Left for Hellsing
by Keith B. Real
Summary: A strange disease sweeps through London, leaving Hellsing to search for survivors.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter One:**

**Survivors**

The rain slowed the fires consuming London, but couldn't douse them.

Integra Hellsing stood outside the Hellsing Manor atop an observation deck and thought God himself wanted the city to be destroyed, judging by the the events of the past few years. An army of vampire Nazis and Vatican hit men had been bad enough, but they hadn't accomplished what this latest debacle had, the destruction of London .

Black smoke rose up from the buildings and mixed with the gray clouds over the city, reminding her that the current contagion threatened the entire country, not just London. Rumor had it that the infection was spreading to mainland Europe, Asia, and the Americas but she had heard nothing in two days, not from the Round Table, MI5, or SIS.

She had the creeping sensation that all was lost.

Lighting a cigar, she squinted at the burning city with her single blue eye, the other missing and covered in a patch, and gritted her teeth. Thoughts of defeat were not ones she was used to thinking, but the path to victory was difficult to see.

All surviving high-level government officials had been evacuated days ago. All known enclaves of survivors had been overrun or lost their ability to communicate. She had volunteered to stay in London with the rest of those under her command in order to provide cover and shelter for anyone who happened to remain alive and uninfected. That mission had been a disaster, as the infection spread to Hellsing's ranks and the infected outside had overrun the outer compound, leaving only the manor itself un-penetrated.

The disease was incredibly contagious, but some people, herself for instance, seemed to have an immunity. Only four Hellsing soldiers had been immune and three of them had been killed in the battle.

A door opened behind her and the last person under Integra's command stepped out into the roof. "It's not safe out here, ma'am," Seras Victoria said. "You should come inside."

"You should be manning the radio," Integra said, turning around to face Seras, a tall, long legged woman with a mop of short blond hair that stuck out at all angles in the back. She wore her blue uniform, complete with skirt and black stockings. Integra wondered why Seras didn't change into something more utilitarian, but then remembered that vampires, if nothing else, were creatures of habit.

"There hasn't been so much as a peep from anyone in days," Seras said. "If anyone is alive in this city, it's us or they don't have a radio."

Integra took a long drag from her cigar and let the smoke run through her nose. "Then we'll just have to go to them, won't we?" she said.

"Go out into the city? That's craz…I mean, I don't think that's a good idea, ma'am. I know I'm more powerful since…that time, but still," Seras said, shuffling her feet.

"Stuff the soldier routine, Seras," Integra said. "In case you hadn't noticed, it's just you and me here. Seems a bit silly to be saying 'ma'am this' and 'ma'am' that all the time. And if you're too scared to go out of the compound, say so."

Seras's face flushed. "I'm not scared," she said. "I'm just not interested in being torn apart. I don't know if you saw, but the disease it…mutated some people."

Integra had heard reports of creatures among the infected. Nothing concrete, but from what she had pieced together, one in every hundred or so regular infected had developed some sort of bizarre mutation that left the person with some added ability or temperament that made them far more dangerous than the average infected human.

"I'm aware of the mutants," Integra said. "They die just like the others. We've also faced worse."

"But this time we lost," Seras said. "If Master were still…"

"We would have lost all the same," Integra said. "We had about as much a chance fighting this as we do Spanish Flu or Malaria. I'm not one to shift blame, but this wasn't a problem Hellsing was designed to solve. That said, there's no reason we shouldn't be rounding up any survivors, no matter how few there may be."

"You're right, uh, Integra," Seras said. "What's the plan, then? Don't tell me we're going to just walk down the streets looking for living people?"

Puffing on her cigar, Integra allowed herself a wry smile. "_We_ are not, no," she said. "You are."

"W-what!" Seras said, casting a horrified glance over the burning city. "I know I'm tough, but…"

Integra waved her hand to stifle Seras's protests. Flabbergasting Seras had always been a tiny source of amusement for Integra ever since Alucard brought her in. Recently it had become a full-blown hobby.

"Well you can't expect me to go out there unprotected," Integra said. "I'd be torn up in short order. Here's the plan: There's an APC in the motor pool that's full of fuel and ready to go. At night, when you're at your strongest and those blighters out there are in the dark, you'll stalk the city and look for anyone who's managed to keep alive. You'll have a radio with you. Our transmitter is still running and we cover a good sized area, so we'll start there and work outward.

"Once you find someone, radio me and protect them until I arrive to pick them up. We'll bring them back her and work on fortifying the place."

Seras had crossed her arms and was not looking enthused. "That's a lovely plan, ma'am, but there's only about a thousand things that can, and will, go wrong with it. Assuming you're even able to make it any distance in that armored boat, this place isn't the safest. It was overrun. The only place anyone can stay is in the manor."

Integra flicked the ashes of her cigar to the ground and thought that more than a little of Alucard's willful nature had rubbed off on his protégé. "So we have some work to do before we go out," Integra said. "No time like the present, either. The only reason we were overrun was because soldiers inside the compound became infected without warning. None of the walls were breached. You and I can clear this place out within a day and there's enough provisions and weapons to stock an army of survivors for three years once we get them in."

"If there are any at all," Seras said. "And who knows what shape they'll be in."

Integra was becoming annoyed. She flicked her cigar away and walked towards Seras. "This is discouraging enough without you finding fault. Are you helping me or not?"

It was a question. Integra gave orders, she didn't ask favors and it seemed to throw Seras off. Frowning, Seras uncrossed her arms and placed them on her hips. "I'm not finding fault," she said. "I'm thinking about how this will work. You're right about the compound; whatever we do it won't hurt to clear it."

"Then lets get it done," Integra said, walking to the door that lead to the stairwell. "We can think of the details while we work."

**To be continued…**


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two. **

Seras wanted to do the sweep herself, but Integra insisted on helping.

"If you exert yourself or become damaged, you'll have to feed more and that's bad for me," Integra said.

There was a refrigerator in the basement stocked with packages of human blood. Preservatives had been added to make it keep longer, but even so, it wouldn't last forever and while Seras was loathe to use it, she did so regularly as there was no sense in letting it spoil. Her only fresh supply was Integra.

The barracks was the first place they cleared. Seras went in front with an assault rifle shooting the zombies in their chests and heads. When they got close or her clip ran out, she used the butt of the weapon to crack their skulls and break their necks.

Integra used a pistol to kill the ones that moved to flank Seras or got behind them. Seras had to marvel at how accurate Integra was with her pistol, scoring head shots each time.

Something stung her ear and she shouted, drawing a fresh swath of zombies out into the hallway from the rooms they had been lurking in. "Sorry," Integra said. "Didn't mean to nick your ear."

The power was out in the barracks and Integra's only source of light was from tiny but powerful flashlights they had clipped to their uniforms. Seras touched her ear, which had healed, and licked the blood from her fingers.

Crouching, Seras fired into the oncoming rush of zombies while Integra shot over her head. The sound of the battle attracted more infected, but they possessed no tactical sense and came running down the hall, screaming and flailing their blood stained hands. Again, Seras's clip ran dry and she used the butt as weapon. Integra ran out as well, and drew a saber which she used to cleave skulls and in some cases, sever them from necks.

When the infected ranks had thinned, Seras reloaded her rifle and snapped the necks of three stragglers; their fevered brains had them pawing at the walls instead of attack but they would become dangerous if left alone.

"What a mess," Integra said, shining her flashlight over the floor. It was covered in bodies seeping diseased blood over the tiles. "I'll admit, I had forgotten about this part."

Seras preferred not to think about it and instead let Integra catch her breath while she made sure nothing remained in the barracks. Once they were sure it was clear, they found the fuse box and flipped the breakers, returning power to the building. It had been shut off a few days ago when a power surge had ripped across London as a result of the chaos.

The next area they cleared was the courtyard, but they did so from the doorway of the barracks, using the entrance as a choke point. Only one zombie could come through at a time and they felled enough with bullets to cause a blockage.

"Can I borrow your sword?" Seras asked.

"Certainly," Integra said, presenting it to her with both hands. Seras took it and leaped over the heap of corpses into a mass of flailing, bloody limbs. Armed with a blade, her heightened strength and speed allowed her to tear through the mob easily.

When there were no zombies within hacking distance, Seras stopped to examine her gore covered uniform. It would need to be replaced. "Disgusting," she said, wiping Integra's sword on the pant leg of a dead man. The smell of the blood made her mouth water, but she wasn't hungry enough to dare indulging on infected blood. She was immune to the disease, but she didn't know what ingesting it might do to her system.

Not to mention the memories she might draw from their tortured souls.

She gave Integra her sword back, reloaded her rifle, and used it to pick off the stragglers that were standing alone between buildings or in small groups. Some had taken to fighting one another, and she shot those as well.

Once the yard was secure, Seras made her way to the front gate and closed it, keeping any new infected from entering. She did so with some bitterness. Had the gate not been compromised, it was possible the three men who hadn't succumbed to the virus would still be alive and there might not be as much of a mess to clean up. She was thankful that the bulk of the horde had left the compound earlier in search of more people to attack, otherwise clearing the place would have required heavy artillery.

Having won the yard, that left the motor pool, which they cleared with some difficulty having run low on ammunition. Seras used her rifle as a club while Integra swung her sword.

"Gya!" Seras shouted, feeling Integra's blade nick her calf.

"Sorry," Integra said, tapping her eye patch. "Depth perception…"

Wincing, Seras felt her leg tingle as it healed and thought for being in front of a one eyed sword-swinging woman in close quarters combat, she was lucky if she only got cut once.

Parked in the center of the main garage bay was a six-wheeled dark green vehicle about nine meters long with its sides angled outward and up to make it hard for rioters, or in this case, infected, to climb up on. "Outstanding," Integra said. "Shame we weren't able to reach it in the battle."

Integra began checking the vehicle's exterior, mainly the tires. Once she was done, she entered the cab, turned it on and began to check the systems while Seras sure the rest of the motor pool was secure. She nearly screamed when Integra tested the APC's alarm which barked loudly through the building before being shut off.

"It's in working order and it's got a full tank of diesel to boot," Integra said. "Let's load it up with weapons and supplies for anyone we find, then we'll get to moving the bodies before we set up room in the barracks for refugees."

"And I suppose we start looking for them tonight," Seras said, wondering when she'd be able to sleep.

"The longer we wait, the less likely we're to find anyone," Integra said, moving towards a forklift. "We can use this to dispose of the bodies. I'll run it, you drag them in her and arrange them in a row."

With a sigh, Seras leaned her gun against the APC and dragged corpses by the feet, when they had feet, so Integra could scoop them up with the forklift. The work reminded her of the aftermath of the Millennium invasion, something she had tried hard to forget.

**To be continued…**


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three.**

The moon hung low in the sky over London and was partially obscured by clouds of smoke from the fires that cast an orange glow on the skyline. Zoey thought it was a pretty sight, even if everything else wasn't.

She was covered in scratches and had been beaten bloody by the hordes of lunatics swarming the city. What was left of her tour group had gone missing or been killed.

Zoey had lived because she had the sense to pick a gun off a dead policeman, only her ammo had run low and she was forced to take shelter in her hotel room.

Having lost count of the days she had spent alone there, she examined a dwindling bag of candy and thought about eating the entire thing before going out in a blaze of glory. It was some weird British candy she had never heard of before a week ago, having won that tour in a contest.

Halfway through the candy bag, she noticed someone standing outside the hotel window on the ledge. She almost choked on one of the irregularly shaped chocolate pieces and reached for her gun. The figure belonged to a woman, and for her to be out on the ledge like that this high up meant she could only be a mutant, one of the worst kind, from the look of her.

The survivors had called them different things, wailers, criers, weepers, but one name had stuck more than any other: Witches. All were female, and if left alone, they would sob in the dark by themselves. Annoy one, however, and they would shriek like banshees and attack.

The witch outside her window was tapping on the glass, odd behavior, but Zoey didn't care. She fired three rounds into the glass, shattering it but the witch ducked. Something was wrong with the witch's arm, it seemed to be made of thick black smoke. The shady arm twisted like a whip and smashed through the remains of the ruined glass, allowing the creature access to her room.

Zoey kept shooting, but the thing disarmed her by knocking the gun from her hand with the shadow arm. "Calm down," it said, holding up its normal arm, palm outward. "I'm not here to hurt you."

Zoey knew she had finally gone mad. She had seen plenty crazy things in the past few days, but this went beyond what was believable. "What are you," she asked, backing up, looking for her gun.

"I'm a vampire," the witch said. "Look, I don't have time to explain and it's unbelievable as it is, but you need to trust me if you want to live."

Zoey found a light by the bed and turned it on. The vampire witch woman was a tall, leggy blond, wearing some kind of military uniform skirt. She had a utility belt equipped with a radio, two pistols, and slung over her back was a long rifle.

And then there was that arm, seemingly made of shadows, that was forming itself back into a proper appendage. The vampire woman was pretty, and something in her eyes told Zoey she was being sincere.

But if she was a vampire, then that meant she had mind-control powers and could be tricking her, Zoey thought. She had seen enough movies on the subject to know. She also thought if the vampire wanted her dead she would be. It had no reason to lie.

"My name is Seras," she said, holding out her hand. "Please, I'll explain it all soon, but I'm on a rescues mission and you're the only living person I've been able to find so far."

"My name is Zoey," she said, shaking Seras's gloved hand. "Alright, I'll go with you, but I don't know where we can go."

"Nowhere, yet," Seras said. "I've got to recon this block a bit more before I can justify calling Integra." She handed Zoey a pistol, making it so Zoey now carried two, one in each hand. "Is anyone else in this building alive?"

"I don't know," Zoey said, putting the last of her ammunition into the clip of her old gun. "Who's Integra?"

"My commanding officer," Seras said. "I'll radio her once I'm sure I've done all I can and she'll pick us up in an armored vehicle. You'll go back to the Hellsing compound and wait until help arrives."

"You mean we can't leave the city?"

"Not yet," Seras said. "We're not sure how far the infection has spread. There'll be time for chit-chat later. We need to move."

"Lead the way, then," Zoey said, hoping she wouldn't be whisked out the window. She wasn't. Seras drew a pistol and went to the door. She opened it into a crowd of infected which attacked her.

Zoey's mood improved when she saw that her new ally could tear through the infected with her bare hands like Hank Aaron through a wet piñata. Zoey followed Seras out into the hall, stepping over smashed bodies and severed limbs. "Wow, you really are a vampire," she said.

"Yes," Seras said, right before something grunted from behind the alcove where the elevators were. "What's…"

Something tall and wide stepped into the hallway. The poor lighting allowed Zoey to gather only that it had gray, pebbled skin, was horribly mutated, and all the muscles in its body seemed t have migrated to one of its arms, making it lopsided.

The creature howled, a sound not unlike what she imagined a rhino might make, before it sprinted towards them at a speed its deformed body didn't appear capable of.

It hit them both and knocked Zoey through a closed door while carrying Seras away. The wind had been knocked out of her, but she could move. She tried to sit up, but the pain in her back kept her in place long enough for two shadowy figures to appear above her and begin attacking. One fell into her mid-section and began to claw and bite, while the other stomped on her face.

Tasting blood and feeling more pain, she fired the gun she still gripped into the dark masses. More blood flew and one infected fell away while the other landed on top of her. Shoving it off, she got to her feet. Spitting blood that had run into her mouth from her gushing nose, she went down the hall.

Down at the end they had come from, was the sound of the wall and floor being torn apart. Zoey looked and saw the creature using its giant arm to slam Seras into the floor like she was a heap of clothing stuffed with leaves.

"Shit," Zoey said rushing closer to get a better shot at the monster. She fired into its back, but it kept slamming Seras into the ground and into the wall.

The monster didn't seem to care about being shot and focused on smashing Seras into pulp. Zoey got as close as she dared and put a few bullets into the back of thing's shriveled head. It slouched and fell dead, leaving a limp Seras to lie at an odd angle beside it.

"Are you…are you…" Zoey knelt by the vampire who had been broken in several places and didn't look like she would be getting up again.

"Fffff," Seras said through bloody lips. Zoey heard bones pop like logs in a fire and watched with morbid fascination as Seras's broken body straitened out and mended itself. Covered in blood and looking like a car crash victim, Seras was able to stand using the wall for support. "B-bloody hell," she said. "What in God's name was that thing?"

"I think some people were calling it a charger," Zoey said, remembering a group of survivors that joined hers briefly before dying. "There are more like it, but there are others that do different things."

"Ah," Seras said. "We suspected…never mind, let's just go and be more careful."

"Good idea," Zoey said, staying behind Seras and wondering what would have happened if the charger had gotten her instead.

**To be continued…**


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four.**

Seras was overdue for a report.

It was only by a few minutes, but it was enough to make Integra's palms slick with sweat. She had moved the radio relay down to a secure room above the motor pool so she could monitor it and be closer to the APC.

The radio crackled and hissed, something it did occasionally even if there was no incoming transmission from Seras. Stray signals abounded in London and often cut into Hellsing's wavelengths. Integra thought she might even get a whisper of a transmission from survivors.

"Integra, it's Seras. Come in," came her servant's voice over the radio. _Finally, _Integra thought, pushing the respond button.

"This is Integra. Status."

"I've located a survivor, an adult female. We're at the Wingate, if you can believe it."

Wingates was one of Integra's middle names, although neither she nor any relative she knew about owned any hotels. "Injuries?"

"Minor," Seras said. "Park in the underground lot. Don't take the road past the park, it's hot. Your best bet is to go by the shopping mall."

"Roger that," Integra said. "ETA in fifteen."

She set down the mouthpiece and jogged down the metal stairs to the APC. Sitting in the driver's seat, she checked a machine pistol and a 9mm Berretta to make sure they were in working order before looking through the window behind her into the vehicle's passenger area. Medical supplies, food in case the APC broke down, and a mini-gun that could be pulled down from an overhead mount and fired out the back end without sacrificing space inside.

All that was missing was half a dozen trained soldiers. She pushed the starter button and listened to the engine begin to turn, then stop.

Her chest became tight and she pushed the button again. This time the engine made an even more feeble sound. "This is not happening," Integra said, pushing the button and hearing the engine make even more horrid noise. The button was pushed again, and for the last time, as it sounded like the machine would explode if it took more abuse. "Bloody hell," she said, grabbing the radio inside the vehicle. "Seras, come in."

"This is Seras. What is it?"

"Something is wrong with the personnel carrier. I'm going to try to fix it." There was some background noise on Seras's end that Integra did not like, a familiar wailing howl.

"Hurry," Seras said. "We're not at the garage yet, but it's getting hotter in here. If we bug out, I'll call."

"Roger, I'll move quickly." She hit the button that popped the hood and got out to take a look at what the problem was. Integra had some education in engine mechanics, but it was limited and she hoped it would be enough to get the APC running well enough to make the trip to the hotel and back.

There was no walking formation that made Seras happy. In front, Zoey was a target, and the infected had no trouble coming up behind them out of dark recesses or intersecting hallways. Seras decided her human companion was in less danger of being shot if she followed behind, so Seras took point through the infested hotel.

Her bones had knitted themselves back together but her torso still felt stiff. She had no intention of being attacked by a charger again and kept careful attention to unfamiliar sounding grunts that emanated from corners she could not see around or inside dark hotel rooms with smashed doors.

The first stairwell they attempted to descend had been blocked by a collapsed staircase. There was no fire or smoke and Seras did not have time to consider what might have caused the damage.

The second stairwell was in better condition, but it was clogged with zombies. Zoey swore and would have run had Seras not held her ground at the top of the stairs and sent her fists and feet into the he heads and chests of zombies as they rushed her.

Throwing punches and giving hard shoves, Seras backed into the hall and let the door shut. The door strained under the hard thumps and throng of bodies pressed against it, but it held. "Come on," said Seras, continuing down the hallway.

Before reaching the final stairwell door at the other end of the building, the door behind her broke, admitting dozens of infected into the hall. Seras prayed the final stairwell was clear and was happy to see that it was. "Go," she said, shoving Zoey in front of her.

The door did not hold as well as the other. They had made it down two flights before there were infected falling over themselves down the stairs. Some tipped over the top railing and nearly landed on Seras.

Because the infected were coming down the stairs in a tangled flood, most going over the top of the broken bodies of their fellows, the two women were able to get down the stairs more swiftly than their pursuers.

The door marked "Exit" led them to the dimly lit parking garage. Seras could easily see the shapes of scattered infected who had made their way in. "Cover me," she said, moving behind a red sedan.

Zoey's gun fired two quick shots, then a third. "Hard to see," she said.

Seras pushed the car in front of the door just in time. The wash of bodies in the stairwell broke the lock but the door did not swing open, blocked by the car. "That should hold them," she said, turning to help Zoey shoot the zombies closets to them.

"Now what?" said Zoey, looking grimly at the metal door above the car's hood as it buckled.

"Integra, this is Seras, come in, please." Her radio made scratching sounds and she hoped it would work in the parking garage.

"Did I hear her right earlier?" Zoey said. "About the car not starting?"

Seras nodded. "I don't know why we didn't check the thing first. Stupid."

Zoey snorted. "I'm glad you came when you did," she said, moving away from the door which was bending near the top. Arms flailed through the gap, making Seras wonder if staying was a good idea.

"I've almost got it," Integra said over the radio. "Give me thirty minutes."

Seras swore and Zoey's shoulders sunk. The zombies on the other side of the door had bent the top in half and a teenager had flopped onto the hood of the car with a broken back. More seemed to be finding their way to Zoey and Seras from the dark labyrinth of cars and Seras shot them as they came close.

"We can't stay here for long," Zoey said. "Maybe if we got in one of these cars."

"They'd smash the windows," Seras said, going over to another car and sliding it next to the one by the door. Bending her legs, she flipped it on top of the other while Zoey shot a zombie that had come up to attack.

Zoey's eyes were wide in amazement and fear. "That's…sorry, but…"

"It's a lot to take in," Seras said. "I know the feeling. They'll knock that car over eventually or another big group will come in from another direction. We need to leave."

More wails and enraged howls echoed through the underground garage. "Where did that come from?" asked Zoey.

"Sounded like the other end of the lot. They're from the level above or outside. Come one." She and Zoey ran while Seras pushed her radio button. "Integra, we can't stay in the underground lot. Try to meet us in the one outside."

"Copy that," Integra said. "Try to make it to a low floor, you can jump down if I pull up outside."

"We'll try," Seras said.

"They're here!" Zoey shouted, firing into the oncoming horde that passed between parked cars in the dark.

_Grenades,_ Seras thought. _Next time, bring grenades._

"Go!" she shouted, and Zoey ran in front to a sign marked at the exit. It led into another stairwell and they following it up. The sound of dozens of bodies slamming into the metal door echoed through the hallway as they went up and stopped at the door to the second floor.

Seras opened it and punched her way through a small knot of infected. At the end of the hall was a window overlooking the street that fit the plan Integra had suggested. Seras let her arm become a mass of black tendrils which enveloped and shattered the window, sending glass down to the street bellow. More wails rose up, and Seras looked to see she had given a glass shower to hundreds of infected.

"What now?" Zoey asked, as Seras pushed the talk button on her radio.

"We're on the west side," she said, "Above about a hundred of them."

"Roger," Integra said.

"Oh, Jesus!" Zoey shouted as a door at the far end of the hall burst open, admitting a slew of infected. Seras's arm went to work, impaling infected and shredding them to pieces. She moved fast, but there were many zombies and some slipped past her only to be shot by Zoey. "Your friend better get here quick," she shouted.

Seras agreed. Using her powers made her hungry and there were slim pickings on the menu.

The horde thinned and those that still came were slowed by the pile of corpses left by Seras's arm and Zoey's bullets. "I'm out of ammo," Zoey, said after she shot a shirtless man in the neck.

"Take the rifle," Seras said, slipping it offer her shoulder and handing it over.

As they preformed this operation, a gurgling sound emanated from behind the door to their immediate right. To Seras, it sounded like a sewer pipe or a human's flatulence. The later notion wasn't far off, as the door was knocked outward by a powerful waddling mass of flesh that came into the hall not three meters away.

It was a fat man, one that would have been a shut-in had he felt pain from having squeezed through the door. His pants were missing and the black shirt he wore was stretched painfully over his shaking torso.

_Not fat,_ Seras thought. _Bloated._ His hands were chubby claw-tipped sausages and his body was covered in softball-sized pustules that pulsed and threatened to pop. Some had, secreting a green-yellow mucus.

"Watch out," Seras said, sending a shadow tendril to spear the fat man through the center.

"No!" Zoey shouted.

The creature exploded like a balloon, showering Seras and Zoey in the puss it had been secreting, along with blood and bits of flesh. The smell was enough to make Seras want to vomit like Zoey was. The smell took Seras back to her childhood, before her parents were killed. She had been sick with a stomach flu and her mother had placed a bucket next to her bed for her to puke in when she felt the need.

No sooner had she wiped the acrid gunk from her eyes did she hear it. A loud, inhuman wailing coming from all directions.

"Shit," Zoey said, spitting out the taste of her own vomit. "Shit, shit, that was what they call a boomer."

"A boomer?"

"They're like damn puss balloons," Zoey said, gesturing towards all that remained of the boomer, its legs. "This crud we're covered in attracts the damn things."

She felt them coming before she heard them, their footsteps made the entire hotel vibrate. The hordes they had faced had been significant, enough to overwhelm all but the most prepared and well-trained defenses, but what she sensed coming would hit them like a Tsunami and flush them right out the window.

And that was exactly where they needed to go.

"Come on," Seras said, stepping to the edge of the window and looking out on the street bellow. It was thronged with infected who were all smashing through the bottom floor or trying to climb the walls. "Grab onto by back and hang on. We can't stay here."

Zoey slung the rifle over her back and piggy-backed on Seras, who drew her shadow arm in and shaped into a black claw.

Zoey felt like a sack of feathers to her, so she gingerly stepped out over the broken sill and dug the shadow hand into the brick wall using her prodigious strength. Her other hand was able to get a fine grip as well, and like a spider she made her way up the side of the building towards the roof.

She felt Zoey's grip tighten and sensed the woman's fear. "It's all right, just hang on," she said.

The wall shook as the horde made its way into the hall. Stupidly, they tried to come out the window and in the rush were sent out like water escaping a pipe to the ground bellow, screaming in rage as they went. "Jesus," Zoey said. "You're friend's not going to pick us up there."

"I know," Seras said. "Grab my radio and tell her we're heading to the roof."

Slowly, and with great care, Zoey found Seras's radio and pushed the call button. "Um, this is Zoey. We're heading to the roof. Change of plans."

**To be continued…**


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five.**

Integra cursed after she responded to Zoey's transmission. _Car trouble, of all things,_ she thought.

Again, she found herself wondering if things would be different had Alucard been around. The Hellsing compound wouldn't have fallen, there would be more soldiers, possibly ones who were better mechanics. Hellsing was not a two-man operation.

_No matter, _ she thought. _Win or lose, live or die, this is what I do._

She had fixed the APC to an acceptable degree and had came to the street that would lead her past the side of the building Seras had initially intended to evacuate from.

She saw why Seras had abandoned it. The street was paved in trampled, writhing bodies that were being crawled over by a layer, and in some spots two layers, of infected, all pushing to get into the building.

They had formed a ramp of flesh up to the second floor. Streams of howling infected crawled up the mangled bodies of the ones that had become stuck. Even encased in the cab of an armored personnel carrier, a thing designed to plow through war zones and absorb rocket attacks, Integra felt fear blossom in her chest at the sight before her. Maybe the APC could plow through them, but maybe it couldn't. Another thought, what if such a swarm attacked Hellsing compound again? There would be no repelling it.

_One problem at a time,_ she thought. _Isn't that what father always said?_

No. Handling several problems at once was par for the course. _Worry about the problems you can solve,_ was what he had said, which was cold comfort sometimes because he had high standards for what problems a Hellsing could solve.

"I'm here," she said over the radio, slowing the APC to stop. "Where are you?"

"The roof," came Seras's reply. "They haven't found a way up here yet, but we don't have long."

Integra craned her neck to get a look at the roof and saw Seras's tall figure silhouetted against the gray sky. "Do you remember when the compound was overrun by Millennium, and I was caught between Iscariot and The Last Battalion on the other end of London?" Integra asked over the radio.

There was a pause. "Yes," Seras said, curtly.

Integra hadn't wanted to bring up the painful memory, but the reference was necessary. "You flew across the city to my aid, so tell me why you can't come down here now."

"The blood," Seras replied. "I've worn myself out fighting these things and we're low as it is."

"There's no way off that roof I can see that doesn't require use of your abilities," Integra said. "The longer you're up there, the more that girl's life is in danger. Get down here and make it snappy."

She lost sight of Seras for a moment, then saw something like a black sail rise above the roof. She saw Seras again, one arm hooked around the waist of someone in a red coat or shirt while her other arm had become a swirling wing-shaped structure.

Seras leaped off the roof and glided. When she got close, Integra saw her vampire and the young woman she carried were covered in some kind of slime. She also saw the horde by the hotel suddenly shift, like a mound of collapsing sand and rush towards them.

Integra hit the button that opened the rear hatch and heard Seras's feet come into contact with the ceiling. Not long after, Seras shouted "We're in!" from the rear, and Integra closed the hatch.

The tip of the horde reached them, and Integra drove over them while turning around and speeding away.

"You have to tell her to stop," Zoey said, sitting on the bench in the rear of the APC. They had been on the road for five minutes and Zoey had spent that time catching her breath and trying to hold her sanity together. It had been badly shaken by the infected but now a vampire…the flight from the roof had been the worst. Somehow it had cemented the surreal aspect of the situation in her mind and she was having trouble adjusting.

One thing she did know, she was covered in boomer vomit. It had been the undoing of some of the people she had been with before returning to her hotel.

"Why?" Seras asked. "We're safe. We're going to a fortified compound."

"More fortified than the second story of a hotel?" Zoey asked. "We're still coated in boomer puke. They'll come right to the front door and pile over it just like they did back there."

Seras seemed to think a moment. She wasn't at all like the vampires in the movies, Zoey thought. In every vampire movie she had seen, which was very nearly every one that had ever been made, at the very least the vampire was predatory, something that only wanted one thing from any human it met. Seras seemed different. She seemed…human.

Seras thumped on the back of the APC and began to speak but was cut off by Integra. "I heard," she said. "What do you want to do about it?"

More minutes went by and Seras had no ideas. She seemed to be moving around a thought, but stopping short of voicing it, something Zoey found to be another human trait and not at all vampiric.

In the end, Integra had to say it.

"Get naked. Pile your clothes somewhere away from the manor and we'll hose the rest of you off," she said.

They were reluctant, especially Zoey, but the thought of how many infected would be coming for them overrode their modesty. After she stripped and let a naked Seras run their clothes into a building several blocks from the manor, they rode back and found themselves in a de-lousing chamber.

Facing a concrete wall like a convict in a 1960s prison, Zoey screamed as a jet of cold water fired from a hose held by Integra sprayed her backside. "It's mostly in your hair," Integra said, but her words were muffled when the jet of water struck Zoey in the head freezing everything and making her sputter. "That's it, bend down, let me get your hair."

The water was cold and while it removed the bile, it left Zoey shivering uncontrollably. Seras, she noticed, looked cold, too, but being dead it didn't seem to bother her as much.

Integra threw them both towels and Zoey felt warmer once she was dry. Integra also had clothes. A skirt and top for Seras, identical to the one she had been wearing, and an olive drab uniform for Zoey. It was a little big, but she fit into it.

Clean of the boomer bile, Seras and Integra walked the perimeter of the compound, making sure no massive horde was bearing down upon them. From the compound, Zoey could hear the wails of the infected attracted by their bile-soaked clothes and quickly moved to scrub down the APC with bleach she found in a storehouse.

"Good thinking," Integra said. "Looks as though we rescued someone with intelligence. Was there anyone with you? Do you know where there might be any more survivors?"

"No," Zoey said, explaining how she came to England as they walked into the mansion. She ended her story in Integra's office.

"Sorry about your vacation," Integra said. "You'll have to stay here while we make sure no one is left to be rescued. Then we can turn our minds to our own escape."

"I'm helping," Zoey said. "No way am I holding down the fort."

There was some argument, but in the end Zoey managed to work Integra to a compromise. Until more survivors were found, Zoey would be in charge of the manor's defenses. "If you're killed," Integra had said. "Then we just wasted the last twelve hours."

"Also, someone needs to explain to me the infection and what a vampire, no offense, is doing in London."

"I can't give you answers on the infection," Integra said. "But I can tell you about Hellsing. Remember that massive terrorist attack on London a few years ago?"

As Integra spoke, Zoey wasn't so sure getting the answers made things more sensible.

**To be continued…**


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six.**

The taste of the medical blood was still in her mouth as she made her way across a mall parking lot towards a bank. It was nighttime, and without too much effort Seras kept out of sight from the infected, taking one down here and there with a silenced pistol.

Half of the stored blood at the manor was gone and what remained wouldn't keep for much longer. Still, Seras had only taken enough to keep her from hearing the blood of Integra and Zoey call to her, asking her to drink it.

She found the bit of hunger that remained was useful in directing her to survivors, or at least the places they had been. She had come across several hideouts where people immune to the infection made their last stands. Their bodies had been torn apart and the pieces stomped by the hordes that had overrun them.

There was no need to search the bodies for weapons and ammo, there was plenty back at the compound. Still, she remembered the locations of the ruined safe houses, just in case.

Something was pulling her towards the bank. Not the smell of blood, although that was part of it, but the sense that something was alive and uninfected there. Alucard never had a chance to show her some of the more potent things she was probably capable of, but she thought she was slowly learning telepathy.

The glass door of the bank was shattered and four infected walked aimlessly across the broken glass, crunching it like leaves. One let forth a stream of bloody vomit, that dribbled down its chest and onto the ground which it walked over.

In some ways, they were worse than ghouls.

Four silent _fwips _from her pistol and the four infected fell dead. The sound attracted two more who met the same fate.

Reloading as quietly as she could, she stepped lightly over the broken glass and into the dark bank lobby, lit only by exit signs and what little light from the street lamps that managed to creep through.

_Someone's definitely in here,_ she thought, reaching out with her sixth sense, the one that told her when to duck before she knew she was under attack, and touched something. It was past the tellers desks, through a door and down a flight of stairs. She expected to sense fear or anxiety, and did to some degree but mostly she sensed boredom.

_Boredom? Who the hell could be bored at a time like this?_

There were infected in the bank, but she was silent and made her way over the teller's booth quietly enough not to alert them. She even made it through the door and down a flight of stairs before having to shoot one, then two more in a long, dark hall.

The hall wound its way around at confusing angles, and had she not been able to see in the dark and sense the presence that dwelled down here, she would have been lost. Understanding dawned on her when she stopped at a large, round steel door with a handle like a ship's wheel with a keypad in the center.

_Some git locked himself in the vault,_ she thought. Without knowing the code, she had two options, knock and be let in or tear the door off. Both would make noise, but she thought knocking might make a little less, so she tried it.

It was like pounding on a mountain; there was no give, not so much as an echo.

With all her might, she sent thoughts at the presence beyond the vault door asking it to open for her. She could sense its boredom decrease and felt its anxiety rise. The more she thought, the more she felt what whoever it was felt, and that feeling was a creeping sense that something was outside and wanted in.

It was not a pleasant feeling.

She felt it move away from the vault door and she sighed in frustration.

Her arm dissolved into shadow and enveloped the door. As is spread, it sought the millimeter thin gaps around the vault. _No,_ she thought._ Smaller than millimeters. That seal is practically air tight._

But darkness, she had come to learn, was thinner than air. It had no real substance at all, and with some concentration that left her head aching, she was sometimes able to push the darkness through solid objects. A few years of practice, she thought, and she would be able to pass through walls just as her master once had.

The shadow found the lock mechanism and released it with a loud click. A hard tug and the vault door swung open. Her relief at having preformed this operation with no noise was dashed when a hail of automatic gunfire slammed into her chest.

Not only had the damned things figured out doors, Nick thought, they were apparently able to guess complicated combination locks. That meant he was screwed, but it also meant so was everyone else. Not one to go down like a bitch, he opened fire at the infected creature that had invaded his sanctuary with the intention of taking down as many as he could before they got him.

He realized his mistake when he heard the shrieks pain. It was a woman. A human woman. She fell backward on her ass and clutched her stomach and chest like she was suffering from no worse than a bee sting.

Nick hadn't shot that many people, at least not before this week. Maybe this was some bizarre thing people did when they were shot, or maybe his gun wasn't as powerful as he thought.

He ran over to the woman, gun slung over his back. "Aw, geez, you alright lady? I didn't mean to…" her foot came up and caught him in the chin. Had he turned his head at all, the blow would have snapped his neck but instead he merely saw stars and suffered whiplash.

Lying on his back, looking at the ceiling of the vault where the shelves of cash were piled high, his vision was obscured by the bent frame of the woman he had shot. Young, bright blue eyes and a pretty face that was framed by a mop of shaggy blond hair, she made Nick think he had died and gone to heaven.

"Wow," he said. "You kick as good as you look."

"Get up," she said, extending a gloved hand. "Are you hurt?"

"Am I hurt? I shot you, lady," he said, grabbing her hand and letting himself be hauled up. It was like being picked up by a crane.

"I'm fine," she said. "I'll explain later, but we have to get out of here, there's…" the howling cut her off. It was from upstairs and getting closer.

"Aw, great," Nick said. "Close the damn door."

"We can't…"

"Can you not hear that?" he shouted. "There's hundreds of them. Shut the door and wait until they get bored and wander off." He walked past her and closed the vault. Now that she was standing in the dim light cast from the bulbs in the ceiling, he could see the dark sheen in her torso. "Oh, God, I really did a number on you. How the hell are you standing?"

He watched her arm melt and become like a nightmarish shrub, bristling with dark tendrils. "I'm a vampire," she said. "There's no soft way to break it, so I'm being blunt."

Nick once heard there were trace amounts of cocaine on most dollar bills. This was a bank vault filled with British currency, but he figured it must be the same. Brits had to use something to snort, right? A few hours before, he had given in to a temptation and touched quite a few of the bills stacked on the rows and rows of shelves inside the vault. Had it been a little fruity? Yes, but he was alone and likely about to die so who cared?

_The coke on the bills is making me see shit,_ he thought. _Yep, that's it alright. A little weird, but she's cute. Maybe…_ He was brought to his senses by a harsh slap, having come mere inches from touching the soft swell of her ample chest. "Ow," he said. "Alright, you're real. Sorry."

"Of course I'm real," she said. "Never mind. At any rate…" something thudded against the vault door hard enough to make it vibrate, a fact that seemed to worry the self-confessed vampire woman.

"Forget 'em," Nick said. "They'll piss off after a while. In the meantime, how about we get to know each other. Name's Nick."

"Seras," she said, and reached for a radio clipped over her shoulder. She pressed the talk button and spoke. "Integra, come in, this is Seras."

There was nothing but static.

"Who's this Integra guy supposed to be?" Nick asked.

"She's a woman, and my commanding officer," Seras said.

"Huh?"

She took a breath. "I'm a vampire in the service of the Hellsing a family, an order of knights headed by Dame Integra Hellsing. Our job is to protect England from supernatural threats, mainly other vampires, but today it's feral mutants. We're a paramilitary organization and we are currently rounding up survivors and bringing them to the Hellsing compound. Any questions?"

_Plenty, _Nick thought. "Are you single?"

She rolled her eyes, something that told him she was high class. "Never mind," he said, pulling it back a bit. Women like this didn't like men who came on strong. _What the hell am I thinking?_ He thought. _She's a vampire and I've been fighting for my life against friggin' zombies for the past three days. Priorities, Nick, priorities._

"Like I said, babe, we'll just wait them out," he said.

"That won't do," she said. "If Integra doesn't hear from me, she'll come looking and put herself in danger. We have to get out of this vault."

"Well we ain't goin' out the way we came in," Nick said.

"What are those up there?" she pointed at a slitted square some twenty feet up.

"Vents," Nick said. "Aw, come on now…"

"I'm going," she said. "You can come along or rot in here. Even if they leave that hallway they'll be around, waiting. You can't escape the city on your own."

She had a point. The pile of food he had taken from the bank's vending machines was nearly depleted and he hated British snacks. "Lead the way, then," he said.

**To be continued…**


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven.**

Nick suggested Seras be the first through the vent, but she won the brief argument and he took the lead.

She could see nothing but Nick's rear in front of her as they made they way through the small, dark, space. She could feel the ventilation shaft shake as they moved. It wasn't the first time in her career she had made her way through a ventilation duct, and it was as roomy and comfortable as she remembered.

"Oh boy," Nick said as he reached what must have been an opening in the shaft. She could see dim light past his hip and figured the lights must be on in the room they were over.

"What is it?" she asked, and was answered by a crescendo of wails that made her think the room bellow was packed with infected.

Nick crawled forward and Seras got her turn to view through the vent. As her ears had indicated, the room bellow was a sea of flailing hands and gnashing teeth. The infected reached for them, jumping up and down like they were at a concert. Beneath the din, Seras could the shaft creak as it rocked under their weight.

"Nick, slow dow…" Before she could finish, the bolts that held the vent to the ceiling broke, sending them crashing to the ground.

In the tight space, there was no way to brace for the impact from hitting the floor. Nick let out a startled barking sound and was silent. Seras herself groaned, the air in her lungs having left by force.

They had crushed some infected in the fall. The metal box they were in rolled to the side, putting Seras in her back. All she could hear now was the clatter from dozens of fists and feet smashing against the outside of the vent. She kicked when she felt something claw at her feet.

Her foot connected with bone, cracking it. Kicking, she shimmied feet first out of the duct and was grabbed and dragged as soon as her legs were clear. Immediately she was covered in stomping feet and fists of the infected.

She screamed and fought her way to her feet. Once up, she sent wild haymakers in every direction, pulping skulls and shattering bones with each swipe. The back of her throat began to tingle, the edges of her vision began to blur, and it felt as though her limbs were moving of their own accord.

Seras tried to keep control of herself. With Nick so close by and her hunger being what it was, she didn't know what she would do to him.

"Lady! Lady! Seras! Stop, God damn it!" It was Nick's voice, coming from just in front of her face.

Once again, she had slipped over the edge and come back before realizing she'd gone over.

It wasn't a question of being able to see things, but one of her waking mind's ability to process what was in front of her eyes. Once the scene made sense, she released her grip on Nick's head and let him stagger away. His shoulder's were bunched up, as though he feared for his neck.

_Oh God, I tried to eat him,_ she thought.

"Jesus Christ," he said. "Forget this, I'm out of here."

Nick began picking his way over the slew of corpses that littered the ground in errant piles. The stench of infected blood was thick in the room and she wondered how anyone could breathe. "Wait, Nick," she said.

"Oh hell no. That was too close. I was fine before you showed up, so thanks."

He found the door and went through it. Seras followed, but Nick leveled his gun at her. "Don't make me shoot," he said. "You seem real nice and all, but c'mon."

"Nick, I…" There was nothing she could say, and she knew it. Nick didn't look like the trusting sort. His face was full of hard lines and his eyes reflected an calm cleverness. A small scar above his right eye told her he'd had some practice in rough situations as well.

"I'll make a deal with you," she said. "Get to the roof of this building and stay there. I'll radio for help. Human help, and you can get a ride to a safe zone."

Nick laughed, a sound full of derision and mistrust. "I saw I Am Legend, lady. They'll be more vampires coming to pick me up and eat me or something. Nice try, though."

He fired two shots above her head, making wood and plaster come down on her. She brushed the splinters from her gore soaked hair and watched him dash off.

"Integra, come in," she said into her radio.

"Copy," Integra said.

"We've got a situation."

He had known London was bad news. _Should've gone to Louisiana,_ he thought. _New Orleans. The food alone is worth the trip._

At the very least, New Orleans would not have had British accents, funny road signs, or smokin' hot vampire women who only try to rescue you so they can have you for lunch.

"If frogs had wings," he muttered, running down the hallway. Once he was sure the vampire wasn't behind him anymore, he began to search the offices for anything that might be useful. All he had was his clothes and a half empty machine gun.

He managed to find something useful right away inside a desk; a small flashlight. Now at least he could see.

There was a crashing sound from down the hall outside and Nick spun around, pointing his gun at the door. Nothing came though, and while he listened, he heard no sound of footsteps from down the hall.

Maybe he should have stayed with the vampire woman.

_No way_,he thought. The look in her eye belonged to a crack junkie after ten years in hell, but not a living human being. Her grip had been nothing to sneeze at, either. Nick had felt like a mechanical vice had took hold of him, not to mention how fast she was when pissed. He had crawled out of the broken vent in time to see the worst of it. She had been a blur, like the whirring blade at the bottom of a blender making zombie smoothies.

The threat to shoot her had been hollow. Hadn't he shot her before? So why had she let him leave?

_So she could get her kicks trying to hunt me,_ he thought, but that didn't seem right. It didn't matter. He didn't need her or anyone else, and had no intention of risking his life with allies who were more dangerous than his enemies.

He left the room and entered the stairwell at the end of the hall. It was dark and he was grateful for having found the flashlight. Once the door was shut, he could hear something echoing from the bottom of the staircase. _Sounds like somebody crying,_ he thought, and looked over the rail. He couldn't see down far, but now he definitely heard sobbing.

There had been a lot of crying in London lately. The first group of survivors he had been with had a few women and children in it, and he could still hear their cries in his sleep.

What he heard now wasn't a cry of panic. Whoever it was sounded sad. _And why shouldn't she be,_ he thought, for he knew well the sound of female sobbing. He bounded down the stairs, confident it was zombie-free if someone had found a place for a good cry, and wondered if she would be a young damsel in distress or slightly older woman, perhaps a mother upset over a recent loss.

_Help is coming either way,_ he thought.

**To be continued…**


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight.**

Integra sat in the driver's seat of the APC. By following directions in an owner's manual, she and Seras thought they had fixed whatever problem it was having and now she felt confident it would start when she needed it to.

The door to the motor pool opened and Zoey entered, dressed in the smallest BDU Hellsing owned and carrying a manila folder. "Done," she said. "I even thought of code names for them like you asked."

_Ordered,_ Integra thought, but it didn't matter. Zoey wasn't military and she wasn't English, but she had proven herself so far. Integra took the folder and looked through it. Zoey was a capable artist as well, and where there weren't photos, there were passable drawings of the mutants she had seen. "Good," she said. "I realize it appears frivolous, but having this information will improve communications and that may prove to be our only edge against these freaks."

Integra handed the dossier back to Zoey. It was a compilation of short files describing each of the known mutated infected. Currently it contained the charger, which Seras had encountered, and the boomer, the thing that complicated their last evac operation. Zoey had also attempted to describe ones Hellsing had not yet encountered. There was one she called a hunter, which didn't look too different from a common infected, but according to Zoey could leap like a flea and had sharp talons.

Zoey said there was at least one variety capable of spitting large gobs of acid, but she had never seen it, only its victims. She had dubbed it a spitter.

The one that interested Integra the most was the one Zoey said she and others called a witch. She had only seen one, and barely, but from what she knew it spent its time minding its own business in the dark, until it was disturbed. Once irritated by something as innocuous as an ill-directed flashlight beam, it would screech and eviscerate the object of its annoyance.

"It's always crying," Zoey had said. "That's how you can tell one's around. It cries and the other monsters don't respond or attack it."

_And why would they?_ Integra thought, remembering Zoey's sketch of the witch. Terror had a way of warping memory, but if Zoey was right the creature's fingers were talons half a meter long.

Not for the first time Integra found herself wondering just what in the hell had caused all this. There had been no chatter in the intelligence communities hinting at it. Even Millennium, the most secretive organization she had ever heard about or encountered, had given some forewarning of the impending doom it planned to visit.

"Has Seras radioed in?" Zoey asked, taking the folder back from Integra.

"Not since last time," she said. "She's supposed to be getting the survivor she encountered to come in this direction. We'll pick him up, whether he likes it or not, and take him back here. I'm fairly confident I can make him see reason."

If she couldn't, then she couldn't. Integra had learned that some people simply couldn't be convinced, but she hoped whoever Seras had found wasn't one of them.

Integra tapped her finger on the steering wheel and decided to light a cigar. Her supply was limited, and she thought she knew a little bit about how Seras felt about her blood supply.

"I'll talk him down," Zoey said. "I was a little put off at first, but Seras isn't so bad."

Integra nodded, but said nothing. They had both expected some difficulties with Seras going out on her own to rescue survivors, but her sustaining serious injuries to only retrieve one at a time was what Integra would classify as an unacceptable loss.

_I was hoping for groups of survivors, but I suppose we'll take what we can get,_ she thought.

Seras heard both the clatter in the hallway, as well as the wailing at the bottom of the stairwell. If Nick had found another survivor, then he wasn't apt to paint a very rosy picture of her and she would be stuck with another uncooperative person. Herding Nick to a location where he could be picked up wasn't going to be easy, much less a second person.

She had to reach the stairwell and attempt some sort of damage control, so she set off, forgetting about the noise that had been made in the hall. As soon as she set foot in front of an open door , something hit her from the side. She thought another of the charging creatures had blindsided her, but the bright streaks of pain blossoming on her head, face, and chest told her this beast was different.

Pulling up her leg, she got a foot under its stomach and kicked, sending whatever it was flying down the hallway where it hit the wall, knocking a fire extinguisher from its cradle.

Seras got to her feet and wiped blood from her eyes. A flap of scalp was dangling over her forehead, making it harder to see. She could feel the cuts in her face begin to heal and lifted the flap of skin back into place to it could begin fusing back to her head. _This will cost me,_ she thought. _If I'd been human, I'd be in rough shape for sure. _Blood seeped down over her stomach, and she looked to see that her shirt had been torn open and her breasts sliced to bloody ribbons.

The thing that had attacked her had regrouped and was crouched at the end of the hall like some kind of frog. It was humanoid, dressed in shorts and a hoodie, but its leg and arm muscles bent in ways no human's did. As it crawled forward, it reminded her more of a cat than a frog, with the long claws at the end of its hands.

She reached for her silenced pistol, but the thing in front of her was quicker. Its rear legs extended and it sailed through the air at her, screaming as it flew. She got a forearm up in time to keep the worst of the claws from her torso, but her arm was cut deep.

She did the reverse of what she had done before and got a foot under the creature, flinging it back over her head down the hall. It landed on its head and it lie on the floor in a daze for a few moments, long enough for Seras to get up and bound over to the fallen fire extinguisher.

The creature had readied itself for another leap, but a face full of extinguisher foam made it snarl and crawl backward. Seras sprayed as she walked forward, running out of foam about four steps from the snarling monster. Holding the extinguisher like it was an American-style football, she threw it at the creature, hitting it in the face.

Bones broke and blood-stained foam spackled the walls and floor. Quickly, not wanting to be scratched, Seras jumped on the monster's chest and began punching it in the face. Her fists easily pulped the beast's skull and its body shuddered before it ceased all motion.

She flicked her hands towards the floor, getting as much blood and bits of bone off as she could. _Elbow deep in gore, as usual,_ she thought. _This is not what I had in mind when I joined law enforcement._

Something screeched from the hallway where the sobbing had been. Seras was reminded of the banshees that were said to inhabit parts of Ireland. The scream was quickly followed by a familiar male voice, only now laden with terror instead snide confidence. "Holy shit!" Nick said, and there was a commotion like feet scraping over a floor.

She ran to the stairwell door and kicked it open. There was another banshee scream, and Seras looked over the rail to see a gray, humanoid figure, likely female from the long hair, slapping at part of the wall.

"Hey!" she shouted, causing the woman to look up. _Infected, _ Seras thought, seeing the woman's gray skin and her twisted, haggard face. What struck Seras most was her eyes. They seemed to glow red. _Bioluminescence,_ she thought. _Has to be, unless there's something supernatural going on here._

The creature shrieked and ran up the stairs at a frightening pace. She could see its mutation had caused its fingers to grow into long, sharp claws that to Seras looked coated in blood.

She tore the stairwell door off its hinges and held it in front of her, waiting for the shrieking woman to reach her. When she did, Seras rushed forward, slamming into her with the door and pressing her back into the wall.

The thing screamed louder and Seras thought she might suffer some hearing loss because of it. Annoyed, she let her arm become living shadow and fashioned into a cone shaped lance with a razor tip. The appendage pierced the door and the creature on the other side. Amidst the shrieks were gurgling sounds, which stopped when Seras used her malleable arm to grip the monster's spine and sever it.

She felt it go slack, and released it. The thing fell to the floor along with the door and Seras stepped over it to go down the stairs.

There was blood on the concrete, but not enough to make her think a life-threatening injury had occurred. The stains led to a broken vent cover beneath the stairs and she could see Nick's feet. "Nick," she said, standing near the vent. "Nick, come out. It's dead."

He crawled out with some difficulty. From what she could tell, the vent hadn't been open and he had dived through it. Luckily for him, it hadn't been a strong cover and he was able to get inside suffering cuts to his shins. Deep cuts from the looks of them.

"Bitch got my legs," he said. "Got your shirt, too."

She felt herself blush and quickly crossed her arms over her chest, having forgotten that a good portion of her chest had been exposed. Nick laughed. "Sorry," he said. "About everything. You're creepy and I don't trust you, but I guess you're alright."

"Thanks," she said, and watched him tear his pant legs into strips. He took off his coat and offered it to her before using his pant legs to bandage the gashes on his legs.

"Lead the way," he said.

"Alright," she said, and took hold of her radio. It felt lighter and she pulled on it. The broken cord bounced in front of her and she let out a long sigh. "I lost my pistol, too. Where's that machine gun you had?"

"Over there, but it's out of ammo."

"Let's get moving, then. The racket that creature made is liable to attract more and we can't afford anymore missteps."

"Agreed," he said, and got to his feet. As he followed her out the door, Seras felt a familiar tug in her stomach.

**To be continued…**


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine.**

A man known to most as Coach sat at the back of a tour bus wiping the brains of his star quarterback off a tire iron.

He had cleaned the instrument several dozen times over the past few days, but nothing seemed to be able to do the trick. At least he wasn't still sitting in the bus's cramped bathroom with over a dozen high school football stars howling for his blood outside. He had finally grown tired of them, had accepted their inhumanity, and bludgeoned them all to death with the tire iron he had been planning to use on one of the bus's flat tires.

They had gone down with more ease than he had imagined, but he wore enough bruises and scratches to last him the rest of his life from their hands and teeth. In the confined space of the bus, he was able to manhandle them into positions where he could crush their skulls and not be overwhelmed. He wondered, while shoving their bodies through an open window, if he hadn't done irreparable harm to his soul.

He wanted to put the tire iron out of his sight forever, and as he contemplated this and the events that led him to London just in time for the apocalypse, he looked outside to a section of the street where the lights still worked, and where errant zombies roamed, staggering and sometimes vomiting blood on their feet.

He saw two figures running across the street. Unlike the others, their movements were coordinated, and they were being attacked by the zombies.

Or maybe the zombies were being attacked by them.

The tall skinny one in the lead caught his eye the most. A tall blond thing, she punched like a mule, snapping necks and busting heads. The one behind her, a man in a white suit, was limping on both legs but swung a flat bat like he'd had some practice.

He couldn't put his finger on it, but there was something not right about the woman. Her arms blurred when they extended, sending blood and bits of bone flying with each hit. That a woman could hit that hard was one thing, but she wasn't letting up. She was like a machine, some sort of kitchen appliance that pulped any and all organic matter that came near it.

They began to move more quickly as zombies flocked to them. The woman seemed more concerned for the man's safety than her own, and so Coach made up his mind. He got to his feet and ran to the front of the bus where he muscled his way out the door and into the street. He jogged around the front of the bus, favoring his bad knee, and shouted. "Hey, over here! I'm not a zombie."

The woman grabbed two zombies by the head and brought them together, smashing them like melons. She looked at Coach and seemed panicked. "Run!" she shouted.

Coach followed them across the road, swinging the tire iron at the heads of zombies that attacked him. He positioned himself next to the man with the bat and hit the ones that came at him on one side, leaving the man to cover the other. "Inside," the woman shouted, tearing open the door to a tenement building.

Inside, the woman held the door shut while zombies slammed against it. "Get that couch over here," she said, pointing to a corner of the lobby.

Coach and the man rushed over to it and dropped their weapons to move the large piece of furniture over to the door. The woman leaped over it and shoved it into the door like it was an empty cardboard box. "Bloody hell, I broke the knob," she said. "Get more things to block the door."

The man in the white suit leaned over the couch and moved the latch, sighing. "That should hold them," he said as zombies pounded on the door, making the latch shudder. "For a about a minute."

The woman looked sheepish as she held the couch to the door. "I think we're almost there," she said.

Coach noticed the front of her shirt had been ripped and she had wrapped some cloth from a different garment around her ample chest. "Up here, sir," she said, and Coach met her eyes. They were wide and blue. "My name is Seras, this is Nick. I'm with the government."

"They call me Coach."

"She's a vampire," Nick said. Seras cast a dark look at him. "But she _is_ with the government."

Coach took a hard look at Seras and felt the world beneath him shift slightly. "A vampire," he said. "I think my head's startin' to spin."

"I think that's your feet," Nick said. "I feel it too."

"What is it?" Seras said, looking up. The walls and ceiling were shaking. Dust motes flitted down and the light from the ceiling fan shook and flickered.

Something bellowed from upstairs. Coach thought of his father, a massive barrel chested man who had rattled windows with his voice when roused to anger. This sound, while similar in volume and tone, had a murderous, diseased quality to it, like the screams of the zombies outside.

It sounded like a bomb went off upstairs. Coach noticed a set of double doors at the far end of the room that were shaking in their frames. On the other side of the doors, something large had come down the stairs destroying the staircase like a wrecking ball.

"Whatever it is, it's here," Coach said.

The doors flew off their hinges, one hitting Nick and the other missing Coach by inches. Standing in the door was a mound of muscle. It had once been human, but its upper body had swollen to cartoonish proportions leaving the head little more than a nub nestled between cords of shoulder muscles. The monster's legs, while thickened, needed the help of the trunk-like arms to propel it forward like a gorilla.

"God damn!" Coach shouted.

"Get Nick," Seras shouted. "Go out the back, I'll catch up with you."

She pulled the door off Nick and threw it at the monster. The door smashed to splinters over the beast's shoulder and it ignored the blow completely.

Coach darted across the room as Seras leaped through the air. He lost sight of her as he helped Nick to his feet and narrowly avoided being trampled by the mound of muscles as it blundered by them with Seras on top of it. "Come on," Coach shouted, pulling Nick through the ruined doors. He could see where the monster had come down the stair case, as it was a ruin of splinters and sheet rock.

"Where are we going?" Nick shouted. "There's more of them out there."

Coach held up his tire iron and pointed at the bat Nick now used as a cane. "Out the back. Maybe there's an alley we can hold 'em off in."

He and Nick made their way down a narrow hall, looking for a back way out and hoping the commotion behind them meant Seras was winning.

**To be continued...**


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten. **

Integra stood at a table she had set up in front of the APC. Before her was a row of automatic rifles and military issue .45 caliber pistols. Some had been collected from the armory, but most had been picked up from where they had been dropped by infected soldiers. Integra had finished breaking down and cleaning her third rifle while Zoey was finishing her first, watching Integra as she worked.

Zoey had been curious about the Hellsing family and its mission. Integra had been hesitant to explain, thinking it wouldn't do to have a civilian, much less an American civilian, knowing much more than she already did but something made her decide against it. Predictably, Zoey had little to say at first and Integra thought being attacked by monsters only to be saved by a vampire hunting vampire was a lot to digest.

Slightly less predictable was Zoey's enthusiasm.

"It can't be just family members, right? All those soldiers," Zoey said.

"No. We get assigned people from different branches of the military and sometimes police. Usually its the most capable ones who happened to have seen something supernatural and the best way to handle it is make them part of the solution. We hired some mercenaries once after a substantial reduction in personnel, but steps have been taken to prevent that from happening tw...never mind," Integra said.

"So what does it take to join?" Zoey asked.

"A military background," Integra said, knowing where she was going. "Normally, it's rather dull work. When it becomes exciting, it's like this."

"I see," Zoey said, snapping parts of the rifle back into place and setting it on the table. "How much longer before we go looking for Seras?"

Integra picked up one of the pistols and started to take it apart. "A while yet," she said, wondering herself just how long was too long for her to be gone without radio contact. Integra hadn't strayed far from the APC since Seras's last transmission, sending Zoey on small errands and making bathroom breaks rare and quick.

Seras had given her a general area of where she would be searching, but it was a lot of ground to cover, not to mention the fact that she could be inside any one of innumerable structures or even in the dark maze of tunnels beneath the city. Searching for a lost Seras was likely a fruitless enterprise and she hoped she wouldn't be forced to do it.

"I think we're out of cleaner," Zoey said, holding up a bottle of gun cleaning solvent. She turned it upside down and shook it. Nothing came out.

"There's more in the armory," Integra said.

"Give me the keys, I'll go get it."

"No," Integra said. "I've been cooped up in here too long waiting for Seras to radio in. I'll get the cleaner, you stay and see how many you can clean without watching me. Run and get me if Seras radios in."

"Okay," Zoey said.

Integra left the motor pool through a door next to one of the large garage bay doors. Once out, she reached into her pocket for a cigar, pulled one out and lit it. She was getting low on smokes and wondered if she wouldn't eventually ask Seras to grab a pack next time she was out. She'd probably get some speech on how she should quit, but she could ignore like she had before.

Her footsteps made flat patting sounds over the pavement next to a high maintenance and storage shed. The sky was a grayish purple and dawn would soon be on them. Sleep was something she needed and the sooner Seras radioed in or returned the sooner she would get it.

Her coughing sounded distant. Perhaps she was coming down with a cold. _I mus need a nap,_ she thought. _That cough sounded like it was from someone else._

"That's stupid," she muttered, looking around for Zoey, or perhaps some badly wounded soldier they had miraculously missed.

Coils of something thick and pink floated in front of her good eye and her arms were suddenly pinned to her sides. She looked down and saw that something had ensnared her with a wet, rubbery rope of some kind.

More hacking and wheezing and she was pulled off her feet and dragged towards the storage shed. Kicking her feet and squirming, she looked behind her and saw the rope was attached to something on the roof. It was a man with a bulging sack-like tumor dominating half of his face. What had wrapped around her was coming from the thing's mouth.

_Smoker,_ Integra thought, remembering a creature Zoey had described in the makeshift dossiers. It ensnared victims with one of its many extendable tongues all while emitting some kind of noxious gas. Zoey had said something about wanting to call it a licker, but the name was copyrighted.

Her feet struggled to find purchase on the ground as the smoker pulled her towards the building. When she hit the wall, she was able to stand, but only for a moment. The smoker began to haul her up, causing the tongue to tighten around her body and arms.

She hated to do it, but there was no other option. Considering the situation, she couldn't risk being severely injured. "Zoey!" Integra shouted. "A smoker has me!"

Her feet were two meters off the ground and the smoker didn't seem to be able to pull her up any higher, but it was able to strain its tongue to constrict her further. She could hear it hack and wheeze as it struggled and she could smell the acrid vapor it produced.

There was a cracking sound and something whizzed past her forehead. More cracking sounds followed and the smoker began to make choking sounds as its tongue relaxed and Integra fell to the ground. She landed on her feet, sending bolts of pain up her legs but nothing that made her think she had been injured.

Zoey was still firing the assault rifle at the roof. "Damn it," she said. "I hit it, but it got away."

Integra examined her bangs and thought she noticed a few missing from the bullet that nearly took her frontal lobe out. She looked down at the severed length of tongue at her feet and kicked at it. "We can't have it running around the compound," Integra said, drawing her pistol. "Come with me and be careful where you shoot that damned thing."

"Sorry," Zoey said. Integra thought she heard her say "and your welcome," but wasn't sure. She decided not to press it as she led Zoey around the back of the shed to see where the smoker had gone.

Nick didn't think he had ever felt worse. First his legs had been sliced to ribbons by some kind of crying hell witch and now he had been nearly crushed by a half ton slab of meat with murder as its chief occupation. Where the vampire woman was, he didn't know, but he thought he might have preferred her to the large black man now dragging him across a small parking lot towards a clump of trees.

"On your feet, I can't drag you no more," Coach said, panting.

Thinking he could actually feel the blood being squeezed out of his wounds, Nick stood and used Coach as a crutch to cross the parking lot where they collapsed behind some bushes. Coach had killed a large number of infected directly out in back of the tenement building they had escaped, enough to give them a clear run for a while and find a place to hide.

You couldn't really hide from the infected, Nick knew. Sooner or later they found you, but being out of sight helped.

"Jesus," Nick said. "This is too damn much."

Coach sat on his rear, leaning back to keep his head out of sight. He was panting loudly, making Nick think their reprieve would be short lived. "You're tellin' me," Coach said. "Did I hear you say somethin' about a vampire back there or were my ears ringin'?"

Nick explained what he knew of Seras. As he spoke, Coach brow became more wrinkled. His eyes popped upon hearing how Seras had nearly eaten Nick, and once his story was finished he looked towards the tenement with a mixture of bafflement and fear.

"I've still got my suspicions, but she's our best chance out of here," Nick said. "Trust me."

"I don't know you, so the jury's still out on that," Coach said. "What next? Can she handle that thing she went tearin' off with?"

"She'll be fine," Nick said.

"What the..." Coach covered his head with his arms as something landed with a thud next to them in the grass.

"The hell," Nick said, getting to his knees and moving the grass aside. Lying there was a pair of legs attached to skirted hips. The lump of meat was covered in blood and was minus a boot.

"Holy shit," Nick said, then "HOLY SHIT!" as the legs began to kick.

"What is it...oh, dear lord," Coach said, looking over Nick's shoulder. "Is that..."

Nick put a hand over his mouth in an effort not to vomit up what little food he had eaten. He almost didn't notice a second bleeding pile of flesh land by the base of the nearby tree. When it began to gurgle and cry, he turned his attention to it.

It was the upper half of the vampire woman, minus an arm. She looked as though she'd been dipped in blood, her face a red mask of pain. Her eyes were rolling around in their sockets, focusing on nothing. Nick tried to look away, but he couldn't. He could smell her blood, there was so much of it. The metallic taste of it filled his nostrils and mouth, making vomit crawl its way up his throat.

Her eyes found their focus and he saw her irises go from bright blue to an evil looking crimson. "Run," she said, as blood welled out her mouth.

And then she started to melt. Coach shouted and stood up. "Come on, lets get the hell out of here!"

Nick, swallowing puke, got up and staggered towards Coach, but fell. Seras's body had lost its detailed features and had become a woman-shaped mass of black blood which began to roll in one direction like a bead of mercury.

He watched it join another puddle of blood that had to have been her lower legs. "Come on, let's go!" Coach bellowed again. "I'll leave ya', I swear."

And then they heard it, the roar from before. Nick looked across the lot to the roof of the tenement and saw the mass of muscle that shattered the lobby from before leap down like a suicidal gorilla. It landed, making a small crater in the pavement and let out another roar.

The blood puddle rose up and took the shape of a woman once more, only her left arm had fashioned itself into a wide blade reminiscent of a bird's wing. The dark shape sped across the lot, gliding rather than running, to meet the creature, which had lifted up a large slab of broken concrete and was preparing to hurl.

It threw the slab at the gliding figure, which dodged it by ducking at an impossible angle. The shadowy being sped up and made a slashing motion with the wing blade, faster than Nick's eye could follow. He knew what had happened when the monster slumped to its knees and its top half fell over backward, its mutated guts spilling out in a heap.

"You gotta be kiddn' me," Coach said. "It's this European food, messin' with my system. That's gotta be it."

"Oh, how I wish that was true," Nick said, watching the shadow at the end of the lot complete its transformation into a woman with all her arms and legs. She turned and began to walk towards them with her head bent down.

Neither moved, both too unsure of what they had just seen to act on their fear. When she was with them again, she looked up briefly. "Sorry," she said.

There was a long silence, broken by the distant warble of a thousand infected throats. "I'm gonna reserve judgment on this vampire business, but for now, you're alright," Coach said. "Thanks for savin' out asses."

"Yeah, good work," Nick said.

Seras picked her head up and brushed her hair back. "No problem. It's my job." She looked up into the morning sky and winced as she shielded her eyes. "Come on. We can't mess around anymore."

Both men nodded and followed her as she trotted over a guard rail and down a street.

**To be continued...**


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven.**

Watching Integra's curtain of blond hair swish back and forth, Zoey realized she had nearly blown her head off trying to save her from the smoker. She felt bad, but reminded herself that she wasn't exactly a gun expert.

"Sounds like this won't be that hard after all," Integra said, stopping to listen. It sounded like someone was coughing up a lung farther down along the wall, near a small stand of trees.

"I don't see it," Zoey said, as they neared the trees. The smoker had stopped wheezing.

"Lookout," Integra said, stepping to the side as a tongue came snapping out of the bushes. It looped over Zoey's head and coiled beneath her left armpit, pulling her forward off her feet. Her gun went off and she heard Integra scream.

_Oh, no I didn't,_ she thought, looking to see Integra on the ground, holding her leg.

"God damn it, you shot me!" Integra shouted, aiming her own rifle into the bushes and setting off two three-round bursts. The tongue wrapped around Zoey slacked and the smoker made one last high pitched wheeze before falling over.

"I'm sorry," Zoey said, getting up and going to over to Integra. "So sorry."

"Damn it, just get me up and back to the motor pool," Integra said, gripping Zoey's shoulder hard. Integra used her rifle as a crutch while Zoey left hers. She led Integra, who was none too gentle in gripping Zoey, back to the motor pool where she got her seated in a wooden chair that had been brought in earlier.

Integra pulled up her pant leg and kicked off her boot. "Go to the medical wing and retrieve one of those red backpacks by the cabinet," she said. "Quickly."

Zoey ran, trying to recall where the medical bay was. She found it and grabbed what Integra had described. When she returned, Integra was looking pale. "Open it," Integra said. "Hand me that plastic box."

"Is there anything I can do?" Zoey asked.

"Not just yet," Integra said, using the materials she retrieved to clean the area around her wound. "The bullet is still in there, but it missed the bone. I think." She winced as she said this. "It's been a while since I've been shot."

Integra wasn't prone to idle banter, Zoey had noticed, and wondering if talking was how she dealt with pain.

"Seras took an EMT course," Integra continued, "so I'll have to hope she comes back in one piece so she can get the bullet out. I'm not going to try it."

"Sorry," Zoey said again. "The thing pulled me over and the gun went off."

"Friendly fire is surprisingly common," Integra said. "It's my fault. I should have had you beside me rather than behind."

Only once she'd staunched the bleeding did Zoey realize how much blood Integra had lost and how lucky they were the wound wasn't more serious. "I still feel like an idiot," she said.

"You're a civilian," Integra said. "And you're still alive, so that's something." The pain seemed to be taking it's toll on her, as her words became more strained. "Slide that table over here, I need to elevate this."

Zoey dragged over the gun table and, wincing, Integra propped her injured leg onto it. "I hope Seras isn't hungry when she gets back, this will drive her insane," Integra said with a slight smile that Zoey didn't like.

Hours later, Integra sat where Zoey had left her looking at the bloody ruin that was her calf. She felt it throbbing, unsure if that was a good sign or not. She had taken more antibiotics than was probably safe in the hope of preventing an infection, and had considered enlisting Zoey to help remove the bullet.

She had decided against that, knowing what would happen if an artery was cut in the process. The wound on its own had cost her a lot of blood, and whatever was taking Seras so long, she prayed it wasn't some injury or enemy that had forced her to use her vampiric abilities.

Blood to a vampire was similar to food with a human, only there were key differences. Integra had read up on it years ago, but was seeing it first hand from the beginning with Seras. She could go for a long time without drinking blood provided she didn't exert herself. Normal activities were fine, but shape shifting and healing wounds made her hungrier, faster. The more spectacular the power or grievous the injury, the more Seras would need to drink.

Normally it wasn't a problem, but when blood was in short supply, Seras became a liability. Her body wouldn't let her starve, and if she was hungry enough it would take over and she would feed as much as she needed to in order to recover.

Integra had let Seras taste her blood before, once in an effort to get her to accept her condition. More recently, with blood supplied low, she had considered the potential necessity of Seras taking sustenance from her.

Having her blood go towards keeping a vampire alive wasn't something a good Christian did, but it beat risking the alternative, which was being devoured completely. Blood was the currency of the soul, and when a vampire drained a person completely without putting blood back into the body, their soul melded with the vampire, making the creature more powerful. Alucard had been invincible because of the sheer amount of souls he had consumed in his unholy life time, while Seras only possessed one extra soul that Integra knew of.

How much of this should she tell Zoey, she wondered. The knowledge were make her less trustful, perhaps far less trustful than they could afford. On the other hand, not knowing might get her killed.

_No good would come of her knowing,_ Integra finally concluded. She wasn't in the business of making friends or trusted companions, merely getting as many people as she could out of the city alive.

She heard Zoey's footsteps pattering rapidly from the hall. The door burst open, making Integra twist her body around to look. Zoey's eyes were wide. "You'd better come see this," she said.

Integra didn't move and instead fixed Zoey with a stare. The idea of walking up to the security room where there was a monitor station made Integra's leg throb even harder. "Just tell me what it is," she said.

"Seras is at the front gate."

"Go let her in, then," Integra said.

"She's got two people with her."

"Let her in before the gate gets swarmed," Integra said.

Zoey seemed like she was about to say something else, but left. Integra wished she had pressed her further.

After several minutes, Zoey returned followed by a black man and someone who looked like they'd been in prison for illegal gambling.

"This is Nick," Zoey said, gesturing to the criminal. "And this is...Coach?"

"That's right," Coach said. "Damn, what happened to you?"

"I got shot in the leg," Integra said. "Where's Seras?"

No one said anything, then Seras entered the room. Integra's stomach became a cold knot when she saw the look on the vampire's face and her red irises. "Seras," Integra said. "Report."

How the two men hadn't noticed her demeanor she couldn't guess. Maybe they didn't know what she was or simply thought it was normal for her to be slouched and feral. "Your leg," Seras said. "What happened to it?"

She was clearly focused on the blood. Integra's eyes flickered over the humans in the room. She remembered when she had first met Alucard and how he had shredded her uncle's men like ragged pinatas. Visions of that scene repeating itself flashed before her eyes. "Zoey, could you take our newest arrivals to the medical bay. I'm sure there will be time for debriefing and introductions once they've been attended to."

"But shouldn't we get you to..."

"Go now," Integra said in a tone that didn't encourage an argument. She watched as Seras kept a careful eye on the trio as they filed out of the room, lead by Zoey. If she couldn't contain Seras here and now, they would be next.

When she was sure they were out of earshot, she put a hand on her pistol, wishing it had been loaded with anti-vampire bullets.

"You need to feed," Integra said.

"Yes," replied Seras, an evil grin stretching her features. It didn't look right on her, and it made Integra wonder of Seras Victoria was simply a mask worn by a monster that had been parodying her since her death years ago.

"Take some from me to get the edge off, then use up what's left in the freezer," Integra said, knowing Seras wouldn't make it to the freezer if she didn't have something now. That she had restrained herself thus far was a miracle, but with the amount of blood out in the open now it was too much to ask.

"Yes, master," Seras said, coming forward. Integra saw from her tattered clothes that it had been a long night. The front of her shirt had been destroyed and shoddily repaired. Seras now cared nothing for it and the tops of her breasts were exposed.

She knelt in front of Integra's leg and licked some of the dried blood around the wound before tearing the bandage off. Integra winced and fought the urge to shoot Seras in the head as he tongue entered the hole.

"Easy," Integra said, feeling it begin to bleed again. "I can't loose much more than I have, so you know."

Seras didn't acknowledge her and formed a seal around the bullet wound with her lips and began to suck. Now the pain was intense and Integra had to grit her teeth to keep from crying out. She felt Seras's teeth begin to worry the wound a little and she tried to pull the vampire off but fell from her chair. "Ow, damn it," she said, as Seras didn't let go and kept drinking.

On the floor with her leg held aloft, Integra could do nothing but try not to scream. She had her gun drawn when Seras knelt and stopped using her teeth and tongue so hard.

The sucking on the other hand increased and Integra felt like she was being stabbed in the leg. The safety went off her gun and she held it to Seras's head just before she stopped.

The look on Seras's face was one of a person who had just finished their last meal, satisfaction mixed with despair. Seras worked something around in her mouth like a bit of gum before spitting it out. The bullet clattered on the cement floor. "You've been shot," Seras said, looking at Integra with blue eyes, then back at the wound. "My God, are you alright?"

Integra wanted nothing more than to have her leg amputated in the off chance it would stop hurting but she forced a nod and lowered her gun. "I've got to get you to the medical bay," Seras said.

"Can you control yourself?" Integra asked.

Seras nodded. "One hundred percent virgin blood, remember? Hits the spot."

"Glad you approve," Integra said. "Now fetch me that crutch and help me to the medical bay."

"Yes, ma'am," Seras said.

**To be continued...**


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve.**

Integra had decided the motor pool was the new command center. Should the compound be overrun, the survivors would be able to access the APC quicker.

Seras had placed a proper bandage on Integra's leg and made sure the others watched. They thought she was a freak, perhaps with good cause, and she hoped by showing them she could do things aside from murder monsters would put them at ease.

It seemed to work, but she got the impression Zoey suspected something. Integra's virgin blood had rejuvenated her completely and she wondered how many of the others she would have had to drain completely to achieve the same result. _Assuming none of them are virgins,_ Seras thought, wondering how she would even work such a question into a conversation.

When Coach began to speak, Seras realized she hadn't been paying attention.

"There ain't no way I'm going back out there," Coach said.

"I'm gonna agree," Nick said. "We barely made it here and we're wounded." Seras had also bandaged his legs where the creature Zoey had dubbed the witch had cut him. He had changed into the basic uniform worn by Hellsing combat personnel while Coach had kept his clothes, mostly because they were fairly clean and nothing else fit.

Seras knew the plan had been to have some of the able bodied survivors help them look for more, but she couldn't blame anyone who didn't want to go back out into infested London.

"Come on," Zoey said. "At least come along in the tank to provide cover fire."

"Hey, lady, that thing's a tin can compared to what we ran into. Just ask Draculina here," Nick said, "She got torn in half by it."

A chill ran down her spine at the memory of being ripped in two. She had been trying to pull the creature's meaty head off as it plowed its way up to the roof. She thought she had it until the creature stopped, took hold of her legs and slammed her to the ground. The next thing she knew its hand was wrapped around her thin waist and her insides had spilled into the ground. For a moment, it felt like going down a slide until her spine came apart.

Things became blurry after that. She remembered not being sure if she had lost consciousness or was falling to the ground. As it happened, she had been thrown quite a distance, coincidentally landing near Nick and Coach.

Her body had reformed itself on its own volition. Normally she had to concentrate to dissolve her entire form, but out there facing the tank it had been automatic. She had always been amazed and more than a little scared of how her body sometimes went into combat autopilot, letting her come to her senses only when her enemies had been reduced to mush.

The tank, as Zoey had dubbed it in her dossiers, had been sighted before. Zoey said she had seen it and spoken to other survivors who had also encountered it. From the sounds of things, Seras had the creeping suspicion there was more than one, right along with the hunter, smoker, charger, and boomer. And if Integra's experience was any indication, the mutant infected had an easier time getting over walls, which meant even the compound wasn't completely safe.

"You won't let that happen again, will you Seras," Integra said, still looking pale. She had eaten a C ration since feeding Seras and had passed out briefly, but now seemed otherwise fine.

"No, ma'am," Seras said. "I was just going to go clean my Harkonnen cannon, actually."

"Your what?" Zoey asked.

"Seras's condition makes her strong enough to carry a small piece of artillery. It's come in handy in past encounters," Integra said.

"I didn't sign up for the draft," Nick said. "I think we should be gettin' outta' here ASAP before something bad happens."

Integra looked at Seras. Her face was a mask to most people, but Seras could tell Integra was reluctant to say her next words. "Our situation is a little more grim than I've let on," she said, looking at Zoey. "We haven't received any sort of communication since the late stages of the outbreak. Not from other agencies, not from other countries, not from pockets of resistance."

"Wait," Coach said. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the capital of England. Don't the queen or some shit have an underground bunker with a radio?"

"She does, as a matter of fact," Integra said. "We've hailed them numerous times but heard nothing back. And not to boast, but I'm held in rather high regard with the Crown and would not be ignored, least of all in this type of situation."

"So what you're sayin' is we're the last people on earth," Nick said, beginning to pace. "Fantastic."

"I doubt that," Integra said. "Although the odds of those few who are immune to the infection also being capable of fighting off the infected for any real length of time are rather slim. I've got a vampire body guard and you lot seemed to have been rather fortunate to have isolated yourselves from the worst of it."

"No disrespect," Coach said, "But it seems to me you just made a good case for not going back out there to search."

"Where would we be if they hadn't come looking?" asked Zoey. "We'd be dead. Now that you're safe you want to just say to hell with everyone else?"

"I didn't mean..."

"What I think he meant was, it still makes sense to send me out on recon while you all hold the fort here," Seras interrupted. "I took a beating last time, but I won in the end and I always will. What I need is a fresh supply of blood."

Fear flashed in their eyes and she felt the urge to hide in the corner. "Which is why my next stop is a hospital to see if they've got a supply of blood on hand."

She had been thinking about this while bandaging Integra. There was bound to be a refrigerator filled with blood powered by a generator somewhere. She would take a cooler with her filled with ice and transfer it to the now empty freezer she kept for her personal use under normal circumstances. It might not last long, but she couldn't take more from Integra, at least not for a while, and none of the others were likely to be willing donors.

"As long as you're find gettin' it by yourself, that's a great idea," Nick said.

"Guess it's settled then," said Coach. "We'll hold out here while you go get what you need. In the meantime, I want to talk about what we're gonna do to get ourselves rescued."

"That will be a very long talk," Integra said. "It would be wise to get some sleep, I think. Zoey, you're on lookout. Seras, you're not going anywhere until this evening, so get some rest yourself."

Nick and Coach both nodded, while Zoey picked up an assault rifle. "Nighty night, boys," she said, casting a disdainful look at Nick and Coach before leaving the room.

Seras woke up to something thumping on her coffin. For a moment she thought the infected had broken into the compound and were pounding on the lid, but these were soft knocks. She opened the lid and sat up, rubbing her eyes.

Zoey was kneeling on the floor next to the coffin. There were dark rings under her eyes and Seras wondered how long it had been since she last slept. "What is it?" Seras asked, making ready to get up.

"I, uh, wanted to tell you something," Zoey said. "You need blood to live, right?"

Seras looked into the woman's face and tried to discern what she was asking. There was an eagerness to help behind her eyes, mixed with some fear and embarrassment. There was something else, too, but Seras couldn't tell what it was.

Not all of this was from the mere reading of facial expression. Lately she had found herself capable of limited mind-reading, which sadly was a power Alucard had never had an opportunity to help her develop.

"I need it to remain active," Seras said. "If I went without, I'd dry up like a corpse but I'd come back to life if I tasted blood." She shouldn't be spilling state secrets to American civilians, but she didn't think any of that would matter now.

"But you need it," Zoey said. "Otherwise you go berserk, right?"

Seras nodded, having figured out what Zoey was about to say.

"I wanted to let you know...I appreciate all you've done and I want to help."

"I can move quicker if I..."

"That's not what I mean," Zoey said. "Um...would I turn into a vampire if you bit me?"

"No," she said. "Only if I drained you and didn't put any of my blood back in you, then you'd become a ghoul."

It was clear Zoey wanted to ask what a ghoul was, but the conversation was making her uncomfortable. "I was going to say, if that's the case, you can drink from me if you really need to. I know you drank from Integra and she won't be able to donate again for a while."

Seras nodded by tilting her head up once, hoping it wouldn't be taken for an outright 'yes.'

"I'll keep that in mind if it comes to that," she said. "I've got no intention of being battered around like last time I was out, and there's bound to be blood on ice at the medical center."

Zoey's mouth flattened into a line and Seras saw her lie hadn't been bought. "Nobody intends to get thrashed by mutants," she said. "If it's as bad as Integra says, it will happen again and probably to all of us."

Seras was silent. She felt the pull of her grave and wanted to go back to sleep. "Alright, I'll keep the offer in mind. Is anyone else up who can pull a watch? You look terrible."

"I might wake up Coach," she said. "I think Nick is more hurt than he lets on, and Coach is having a hard time sleeping. He mentioned he was here with a bunch of kids or something."

"Alright, then," Seras said. "Good night."

"Don't you mean day?"

"Right." Jokes and puns about the life of a vampire had long been exhausted. She offered Zoey a weak smile and she helped her with the lid of her coffin.

She was lying comfortably about to let the void take her when a familiar voice echoed in her mind.

"That girl, I think she likes you," said Pip Bernadette, former captain of the Wild Geese, a band of mercenaries once hired by Hellsing.

Seras hadn't heard him speak for a long time, although she always felt his presence. "Stockholm Syndrome," Seras said in her thoughts.

"Perhaps," Bernadette said. "I overheard she's a fan of monster movies. Maybe she is your secret admirer."

She had mentioned that, hadn't she? Having Bernadette around, he sometimes noticed or recalled things she didn't. After the battle with Millennium had been over with and the shock of losing Alucard had dulled, she began to worry about having someone with her all of the time and never being alone. Soon she realized his presence was more like a sentient memory, something that came and went when it pleased but could be called up and banished more easily than any actual recollection.

"She hasn't seen me like the other two did," Seras said. "She still sees me as mostly human."

"Yet she offers you her blood. I think that's more than gratitude," Bernadette said. "In fact, if I'm not mistaken, I think she likes you, likes you, if you catch my drift."

"Pervert," Seras said, banishing Bernadette to the pits of her soul. Being absorbed by a vampire did little to change a person, she had noted.

Thinking about Zoey and what her blood might taste like, she went to sleep.

**To be continued...**


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen.**

Filled with virgin blood, Seras leaped across rooftops with ease towards the closest hospital. Fire was slowly engulfing the city and it cast everything in an orange glow.

The light made it difficult to keep out of sight, and her passage did not go unnoticed. By the time she was a block from the medical center's main building, she had torn the tongue from a smoker and broken the backs of two hunters that accosted her.

She stood on the roof of a building overlooking a main route. Bellow, the streets were teaming with infected. Some had seen her and were waving their arms in impotent rage, while others seemed content to mill around and occasionally vomit blood.

Something was on the roof with her, behind a pile of boxes that had been set out for some unknown reason. She could hear what sounded like liquid sloshing and a low belch before heavy footsteps came plodding.

Seras ducked and stepped to the side, avoiding the stream of noxious puke as it left the boomer's throat and went over the side of the building. "Not this time," she said, grabbing the boomer's bloated, pustule covered wrist and pulling it towards the edge of the building. Its bulk and momentum made it east to send over the side where it splattered on the ground bellow like a trash bag filled with soup. All infected in the area suddenly let out violent screams and flocked to where the boomer had exploded.

Bending her powerful legs, she leaped into the air and let her arm shape itself into a wing that folded over her back and allowed her to glide over the street, landing on the hospital roof. From her new angle, she spotted something that made her heart leap. A helicopter.

It was resting like some giant insect silhouetted against the burning night sky. She walked over to it and saw the doors were open, and dried blood had been smeared around the outside and on the landing platform. It looked as though the helicopter had been attacked shortly after making a hasty landing.

The cockpit was a mess, as was the back. There was no sign of the people who had piloted or flown in it aside from the blood. Perhaps they had become infected themselves or been dragged off. None of these were important questions, but the cop in her had never truly died.

She now hoped the helicopter pilot in her was alive and well. She began to touch buttons on the control panel and was happy to see they came on, including the fuel gauge showing there was enough for a substantial flight.

That meant the chopper was likely parked when attacked, and those trying to use it never got as far as turning it on.

Now a hard ball formed in her stomach. She had been trying to get her pilot's license for the past three years as part of what Integra had called "professional development," but the going had been slow not because of her ability to learn, but because of other time commitments and the fact that going out in daylight still bothered her.

Filled with blood, she would be fine in the sun for a few hours. That reminded her of what she really had come for, and she started off towards the roof entrance.

Her ears picked up something stirring behind the helicopter. She guessed whatever it was had just woken up, as it was making confused eager grunting noises. _An animal? _She thought. No, sounded human enough, especially now that it was emitting a kind of grunting maniacal laugh, like a retarded hyena or something equally absurd.

She had turned in time to see low movement out of the corner of her eye. It had come from the small gap under the helicopter. _Infected,_ she thought, as something leaped onto her back and enclosed her face with large grime-covered hands. The creature began to laugh hysterically as it rocked back and forth on her shoulders, digging its fingers into her face and eyes.

_I don't have time for this,_ she thought, and grabbed the thing's forearm with both hands, snapping it like a chicken leg. The creature screamed and began to bite the back of her head. It's teeth were flat and dull. Despite its arm being broken, it held on with the other while pounding her about the head and shoulders with its flopping injured arm.

Getting leverage under its other arm, she threw it off her back and sent it sprawling.

Like all infected, it had once been a man. A balding one with blond, curly hair. His body had bent and twisted so that he was a hunchback with powerful arms and stringy but swift legs. It was dressed in track shorts and a blood-stained sleeveless white shirt. Somehow it had lost its lips and its red eyes reflected the laughing mania that had consumed it.

It darted at her and she kicked it in the chest, mid-leap. She felt its bones cave and saw the brickwork it bounced off crack. Wounded, it staggered in a circle getting ready for another attack when she let her arm dissolve and envelope its head like one end of a Chinese finger trap. The laughing was muffled then cut off completely as Seras crushed its skull.

She had brought a gun, which she patted in its hip holster, but didn't want to attract attention by firing it. Her Harkonnen cannon had also been taken out and cleaned, but it was back at the Hellsing compound. This wasn't a combat mission, she reminded herself, more of a trip to the grocery store than anything else.

Having been attacked, her senses were on high alert as she descended the staircase. She really couldn't afford another hard battle, and her sense of anxiety began to grow as she noticed none of the emergency lights seemed to be on. Knowing nothing about the hospital's power supply, she couldn't afford to assume the blood freezers were offline and pressed forward.

"Damn," she whispered, seeing the hallway in front of her was not completely uninhabited. Three infected were standing around, perhaps unable to see easily in the pitch black hallway. Their night vision was good, Seras had learned, as their eyes shined like an animals when hit with a light. Others were in the hall as well, but seemed to be asleep.

To her right was a fire ax resting peacefully behind a dusty plastic screen. Seras opened the tiny emergency cabinet and saw the three infected come forward to investigate. She beheaded the first and split the skull of the second in two quick movements. The third she dealt a horizontal blow across the stomach, spilling the contents to the floor, making it slippery. The remaining infected rose, hearing the snarls of their fellows and came forward. Unseeing, the slipping in the blood and Seras dispatched them with the ax.

_Not bad, _ she thought. If she could stay quiet and use the halls to create bottlenecks when attacked, she could find what she needed and be gone.

One problem remained. The hospital was not a small place and she had no clue where they kept the blood.

**To be continued...**


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen.**

The discussion from earlier had left Integra thinking. The two newest survivors raised an important issue: Here they were rounding up the remaining humans in London and bringing them back to the Hellsing compound, but to what end?

There had been no word from anyone, not over the radio nor by any other means. What concerned her the most was the lack of air traffic. She could believe someone in the high command had decided to leave her for dead or hadn't been able to overcome some communication problem, but for there to be not so much as a recon flight over London, that meant there were serious problems with the infrastructure.

Perhaps everyone had been infected. Her own soldiers had mutated before her eyes with only a small fraction showing immunity. While she didn't like it, she had to admit one of the few reasons she was still alive was by virtue of her vampire bodyguard. The other survivors had isolated themselves, then been rescued by Seras, so it was entirely possible that the disease had killed or mutated nearly everyone in a position to communicate or send help.

Lying awake in bed after a long sleep, Integra had mulled these thoughts over, as always wondering what her father or his father would have done. Her former butler had remarked once during a time of dire straights that what the Hellsing Agency's founders faced a century and a half ago made their current problems look like child's play.

Those words had been a great motivator then, but now she wondered if it wasn't Integra Hellsing that faced the greatest of threats and buckled under their weight.

_Step one,_ she thought. _Confirm our situation. If there's someone else out there, we must employ a different strategy than we would if there was not. If there's no one out there and we are the only one's alive, then..._

Then she didn't know. There was enough food in the compound to keep four people going for years. The question then became how long would the infected last and would they pose a threat? As the bullet hole in her leg attested, they could get inside the compound. How long before the walls suffered a full-scale assault? Would they hold?

_One thing at a time_, she reminded herself. _First confirm the situation, then plan._

Keeping her mind on the first step proved to be difficult, and her thoughts wandered to bridges that wouldn't need crossing for a long time. Could the human race be repopulated with four people, did she prefer monarchy over theocracy, was it better to hunt and gather, or were agrarian societies the next step up the ladder. Wild, far reaching thoughts she ultimately felt silly for having.

She didn't feel like it, but she grabbed hold of a cane propped by her bedside and used it to get up. The pain was immediate and she suspected the muscle would never be right again. Thankfully the bone and tendons seemed to have escaped injury.

"I'll look like a damned pirate before it's all over," she said, and chuckled while hobbling through the door and towards the motor pool. On the way, it occurred to her that the manor wasn't exactly handicapped accessable.

She entered the motor pool and saw that the APC was missing and Zoey had been tied to a chair. A strip of cloth had been tied to form a gag and she fixed Integra with the gaze of a beaten dog. "Bloody hell," Integra said, hobbling to Zoey and undoing the gag. "What happened?"

"What's it look like?" Zoey said. "Those two assholes ties me up and took the APC."

"Are you hurt?" Integra asked, untying the knots that held Zoey to the chair.

"No," she said. "But I heard a crash by the gate when they left."

"At least they left the garage bay doors closed," Integra said, using her cane to peer out the square window of the garaged door. "Bastards."

It looked like Coach and Nick had made an attempt to open the gate without wrecking it, but an armored personnel carrier wasn't the easiest machine to handle and they had damaged it anyway. Roughly ten infected had come into the grounds to investigate. Integra could see their shadowy forms just barely as they were caught in the light of the tiny bulbs that still flickered from buildings.

"What do we do?" Zoey asked.

She wanted to say find a vehicle and hunt the two deserters down, but there wasn't time. "If I wasn't wounded I'd say clear the yard and secure the gate, but I think it would be smarter if we kept out of sight and waited for Seras to return. She's strong enough to make short work of the few infected that have come in and repair the gate."

"Do you think she'll get hurt again?"

"She's good about not letting an enemy mop the floor with her twice," Integra said. "After studying you're sketches, she'll know what to expect."

She'd had experience reading the body language of her own troops as well as her enemies, and Integra wondered if she didn't detect a small level of disappointment in Zoey. That made little sense, as she seemed to adore the vampire more than anything else. Integra had chalked it up to Seras being the good cop to Integra's bad, but now she had to wonder.

Battle was a tax upon one's sanity. The ones who made it as soldiers found ways to cope, but war simply wasn't for everyone, and Integra had to consider Zoey's apparent toughness as a possible facade. _She did shoot you in the leg not long after she nearly took your head off, _Integra thought. _Is she going to snap and turn on us? She can't kill all the infected, which are the cause of her problems, maybe she associates us with her suffering and seeks out destruction subconsciously?_

When Seras returned, she would ask her opinion on the matter. Despite being a vampire, Seras often had more insight into the thoughts of common people than Integra did. "Let's get a second radio set up and wait for a report from Seras. We'll tell her what's happened and see how close she is to getting the blood she needs," Integra said.

"Why don't we radio her first?"

_Patience, _Integra thought. "Because if she's being sneaky, I don't want to ruin it with radio chatter. Better to let her decide when it's safe to open a comm line."

"Oh," Zoey said, he face flushing.

_Clear ignorance,_ Integra thought. _Maybe the shot really was an accident, but that doesn't explain her wanting Seras wounded and hungry._

If she was being paranoid about the only person who didn't abandon her, then perhaps it was her own sanity that should be questioned, she decided. _One problem at a time,_ she reminded herself.

**To be continued...**


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fifteen.**

Using her senses and everything she knew about moving quietly, Seras worked her way slowly into the bowels of the hospital, avoiding encounters with the infected and using her bare hands when she had to kill to avoid the noise of a gunshot.

It took her a long time to find where blood was kept. She expected something more high-tech than a stainless steel freezer, but didn't complain and it was easy to access. She opened the door and was happy to see the light came on revealing perhaps fifty packages of blood hanging from metal rods in cool air.

She hadn't been able to find a suitable container at the Hellsing Compound, but after making more noise than she wanted, she found one that had been used to move organs for transplant and filled it with ice from the freezer section of the blood refrigerator.

As she was packing as many blood packs as she could into the cooler, she heard what sounded like a cat and turned her head towards the doorway and gasped.

Like the other mutants, its body was twisted into a gross parody of humanity, this particular example having an elongated neck and a wide mouth that dripped with green spittle.

As her arm dissolved into a shadowy spear, the monster's stomach convulsed and it spat, sending a gob of green goo the size of Seras' head towards her. She didn't expect such an attack, and felt it splash on her face.

First it felt warm, then came the agony.

She screamed and tried to wipe it off, burning her hands in the process. The substance had gotten into her eyes and melted them, blinding her and sending twin bolts of pain into her head. With four of her six senses having been sent to a world of suffering, all she could do was move backward and duck behind a large stainless steel table that dominated the center of the room. She kept trying to wipe the burning goo off, taking clumps if melted tissue with each swipe.

The monster let out a triumphant screech and padded through the goo snarling and hissing at it went. _Think, damn it,_ Pip said, rising up in her mind again. _Forget the pain and kill it._

Reaching our with sixth sense, she could tell the creature was standing over her about to bite or swipe with its claws. She preformed a leg sweep and felt herself connect with the monster's thin legs, knocking it down. On the ground, it screeched louder and began to bite and claw at her. She wrestled with it, cutting her hands on its teeth before getting a grip on its head and twisting. The thing's neck snapped and it went limp, leaving her to lie on her back in agony as her body regenerated.

Once her eyes had grown back, she stood and looked at her hands and legs. The acid had melted off everything down to the bone and she could see muscle tissue regrowing, followed by skin. Looking at the pile of melted flesh on the floor, she could only guess how ghoulish she must look.

_Think of what that would do to a human, _said Pip. _It would be the end of them for sure._

She used her shadow arm to wipe the rest of the goo off and was relieved to see it hadn't burnt her clothes to the point where she was indecent. Her relief turned to anger when she saw what happened to the blood she had loaded into the cooler. The acid had eaten through the bags, leaving a reddish bubbling soup.

She had emptied most of the refrigerator, and swore violently as she took what was left and drank it to quell the gnawing in her stomach. _What a bloody waste of time,_ she thought. _Every time I go out this happens._

_Waste? What waste? The helicopter, don't forget. Integra knows how to fly, even with an injured leg._

She supposed he was right, the trip wasn't a complete loss, and she had gained valuable intelligence on two kinds of mutants. One thing was for certain, she wouldn't let the spitting creature get the drop on her a second time.

Coach sat behind the wheel of what he guessed was some kind of riot tank trying to see through the tiny windows so he could at least stay on the road. Cars and other obstacles didn't matter much, as the tank plowed through them easily. Nick sat next to him glancing between a tourist map and what he could see of the road.

It was early morning and they were in a part of the city that had been overtaken by a dark haze created by the many spreading fires. The infected had noticed them about half a mile from the vampire den, or whatever it was, and had been crushed under the vehicle's wheels or between debris.

"I'm pretty sure this road will take us out of the city," Nick said. "Hopefully it won't suck as much there."

"Then what? We've got an entire ocean between us and the states."

"I suppose we could go back and hang around with the vampire," Nick said. "I'm sure we can explain takin' their ride as a misunderstanding."

Coach grunted. It had been mostly his idea to steal the tank and leave but Nick didn't need much convincing and in fact had smoothed over any doubts Coach had. They both agreed that the vampire woman seemed nice enough, but after seeing her in action and the bizarre way she behaved with the other blond woman, both felt they had only escaped Day of the Dead to seek refuge in Dracula's castle.

They came to a stretch of road clogged with vehicles that led to a bridge stretching over a river. Beyond it was what looked like suburbs. "Hey, what's that?" Nick said, pointing through the vehicle's slitted window.

Coach squinted, applying the brakes. It looked like to of the same sort of tank they were in had parked themselves at the bridge at angles so they formed an outward V. The top of each was fixed with a gun turret but Coach couldn't tell if they were manned. "Looks like a blockade," he said. "I think we can push past them."

He drove the tank towards the bridge, nudging aside vehicles as before He shouted and ducked when the guns atop the other tanks began firing, the shells pinging off the sides of their own hull. "Relax," said Nick. "I think they're shooting at the zombies were brought along."

That seemed to be the case, and Coach kept driving forward.

"Halt," came a voice over a bullhorn. "Identify yourself."

Coach hit the breaks and he and Nick scrambled to find something they could use to reply. "Try the radio," Nick said.

Coach took the radio and pushed the button. "Uh, hello," he said.

There was a pause and the radio crackled back to life. "Identify yourself, over," a voice said.

"Uh...they call me Coach. I got one other guy here by the name of Nick. We're not infected, we're just tryin' to escape."

"Where did you obtain the vehicle, over," said the voice.

"Shit, they're gonna think we stole it," Coach said.

"We did steal it. I don't think that's the problem. Remember, vampire girl and her friend said they were with the government."

"We found it," Coach said over the radio. "Look, we're not infected. We just want to get somewhere safe and get some answers."

"Turn off the vehicle and step out, over," the voice said.

"I don't like this," Nick said.

"I haven't liked anything for a while now," Coach said, "but we don't have a choice."

Coach shut the tank off and both he and Nick got out. He kicked himself for not thinking to take any weapons. Tying Zoey up and escaping had occupied his thoughts and forced important things out, like the prospect of what was happening now.

"Put your hands on your heads and walk forward," came a voice over the bullhorn. Coach wasn't sure, but he didn't think either the radio operator or the bullhorn guy were speaking with English accents. They did as they were told and were about fifty feet from the other APCs, when a strange figured stepped around through the gap in the V.

It was a woman with short blond hair dressed like a Catholic priest. Her face was wrapped in crude bandages and she wore sunglasses, reminding Coach of the Invisible Man. "Stop," she said, her words slurred as though she had suffered some injury to her mouth. "My name is Heinkel Wolfe and I wish to know exactly where and how you obtained that vehicle."

"Look, lady, we don't want no trouble..." Nick began to say, but stopped when Heinkel drew a pistol from inside her long gray coat.

"Come with me," she said. "My men and I have exhibited an immunity, much like yourselves, but we are not here to rescue anybody."

"Then what the hell are you here for?" Coach asked, the limit of his patience reached. "Has the whole damned world gone insane?"

Heinkel laughed. It was an unpleasant sound, filled with saliva. "Yes, it has. For you, it's about to get even crazier. Come, I won't ask again."

They followed Heinkel behind the APCs while armed men, some dressed as priests, went past them to their parked APC.

When they were in the rear of the left APC and seated, Heinkel took off her sunglasses. Coach had heard the expression "crazy eyes" before, but had rarely seen someone who fit it so well. This Heinkel person seemed as insane as she looked.

"Before we start question time, I should tell you I already know that is one of the Hellsing Agency's armored personnel carriers and they wouldn't leave it lying for you to take if they were alive to guard it, so...is Seras Victoria dead?"

Nick and Coach looked at each other. "She was walkin' around last we saw," Nick said.

"And what of Integra Hellsing?"

"She got shot in the leg by some college girl on accident, but she's alive," Coach said. "What do you know? Who the hell are those people? Who the hell are you for that matter?"

"What about the others? Were there other soldiers at their compound?"

"No," Coach said. "Seemed to be a real skeleton crew."

He didn't like the smile he could see through Heinkel's bandages. He didn't know the specifics, but years of reading youth football teams had given him an intuition of sorts, one that was telling him now that the catastrophe at hand meant little to the person in front of him and that he and Nick had stepped into a deep pile of someone else's shit.

"Excellent," Heinkel said. "Well, it seems the reasons for keeping you alive have all run out. The problem with this contagion, you see, is that those of us who are immune act as carriers and infect other people. Global containment efforts have been quite brutal and not very effective."

She raised her gun and squeezed the trigger.

**To be continued...**


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter Sixteen.**

Integra had set up a second radio in the Round Table conference room. She and Zoey had also moved their weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies to that room as well. "It's the most defensible room in the building that won't leave us completely trapped," Integra said to Zoey before they started the move.

The pain in her leg was savage and nagging, but she avoided taking more pain killers for fear of losing her edge or falling asleep and letting another fiasco happen.

Integra had also retrieved a list of old radio frequencies printed on old yellowed paper from her office. The list had been made with a typewriter, indicating its age. "None of the new channels are getting us anywhere. It's possible someone's either still using these or they've switched over without notifying us."

Again the nagging question of why had no one tried to communicate with them. _Maybe everyone who has the cause and ability to speak to us had succumbed to the infection after all, _Integra thought.

A new idea had crept into her brain since the two Americans had taken the APC and left, preferring to brave the infected rather than dwell with a vampire. Being an expert on vampires, she often forgot how little people knew of them. After the battle of London, Integra had expected a new era to be ushered in. One where the world at large was aware of what lurked in the shadows and efforts to eradicate those elements would go mainstream, so to speak.

That hadn't happened. The massacre of thousands of people by vampires had been played off as a terrorist attack. A spectacular terrorist attack involving neo-Nazis on drugs. The reality was only slightly crazier than the lie, but it worked, and vampires remained beings of legend as far as the public was concerned.

While most of Integra's government colleagues were aware of vampires, few were well versed on the subject, which annoyed Integra as the basics were rather simple. They could be easily explained via instructional comic books, in fact.

One of the simple bits was that for a vampire to create another, it has to drink the blood of a member of the opposite sex who is a virgin, otherwise the victim become a ghoul, a twisted zombie under the command of the host vampire.

_The things that have overtaken the city are not ghouls, but am I the only one who knows that?_ Integra thought.

Could she really blame anyone for being mistaken? The Millennium vampires had broken many of the rules she once held has immutable fact, and even Alucard himself, the ultimate vampire, had been an anomaly.

_What if they blame us for the infection?_ She thought. _Wouldn't someone at least call? Bomb the compound, perhaps?_

The lack of information was more of an irritation than the bullet wound and she would have traded a second shot for some idea of what was happening.

She spent a few hours on the radio, listening to old channels as well as speaking over them. Shortly before evening, she got what she was looking for.

It was a series of beeps that to the untrained ear sounded like Morse code. It was in fact a different sort of code, one Integra had nearly forgotten. Rather than trouble Zoey, she hobbled to her office and retrieved another sheet of paper kept locked in a secret safe beneath her chair. She returned to the Round Table and began to decode the message, which she was pleased to see was new, if recorded and playing on a loop.

It was from a station on the Isle of Wight, an island about two and half hours journey by car to the south. It was best known as a resort destination, but it had a number of small military installations tucked out of sight that primarily served as communications relays.

She decoded the message and wrote it on a sheet of paper. It essentially said that Wight was free of the infection and that a check station had been set up in Cowes to screen people.

_Even if it's been compromised, there will be less infected there, plus their communication setup will be more powerful that what's in this compound,_ Integra thought. "Cowes it is," she said aloud. "Now all I need is for Seras to go on recon and find us a way to get there."

She heard a door close down the hall and thought Zoey was coming back from her patrol until she recognized the long strides. "Speak of the devil," Integra said, as Seras entered the room looking irritated. There was a faint acrid smell coming off her and parts of her uniform looked to have been melted off. "What the hell happened to you?"

Seras told the story of her encounter with the spitting mutant and how she had failed to procure any blood. "On the plus side," she said, "I found a helicopter parked on the hospital roof in fairly good condition."

"Good. We're heading to Cowes. I've discovered a coded message being broadcast from there."

Seras sat down in a chair and sighed. "Thank God. I feel rotten leaving London, but I don't think I can keep this up. Every time I go out something awful happens."

"Have you seen Zoey?" Integra asked.

"No."

Integra related how Nick and Coach had tied Zoey up and left with the APC. "You'll notice there are a few more zombies in the yard as usual. And could I trouble you block the gate before too long? They damaged it when they left."

Seras' fists clenched and she stood. "When did this happen?"

"Forget it, we don't have time. They're likely dead and we need to get to that helicopter. The question is, should we move at night or wait until we have light?"

Seras seethed for a few more seconds before sitting down. "Daylight. They don't seem to have a problem seeing in the dark, so night is only a disadvantage for us."

"Then we'll leave in the morning. That leaves how we'll actually get there without being torn apart."

They looked at each in silence waiting for a thought on how to achieve their desired aim to come to mind. "You two could take the car while I clear the way," Seras said.

"We'd still get mobbed," Integra said. "And with your string of luck you'd need to eat one of us on the helicopter."

They discussed several options, including Seras making the short flight to the Hellsing compound, but as she hadn't yet mastered landing, they both agreed that putting the chopper down in such a narrow space would be courting disaster. Their only other idea was for Seras to carry Integra to the hospital and return to pick up Zoey, but that left her alone.

"That might be our best option," Integra said, as Zoey entered the hallway and came to stand in the door.

"Hey, you're back. How'd it go?" Zoey asked, looking at Seras.

Seras explained how she had found a helicopter and that they planned to fly it to Cowes on the Isle of Wight, only they needed to get to the hospital roof in one piece. Zoey frowned upon hearing she would be left to fend for herself.

"I'm a big girl, but if there's another way, I'm for it," she said.

"I'm not sure there is," Integra said. "This place hasn't been attacked by a horde since the first time. If you stayed in the conference room and kept a gun on the door, we'd be back in short order."

"Alright, it's settled," Seras said. "First thing in the morning. I'll keep a watch; I won't sleep tonight anyway."

Zoey and Integra's bedrolls were in the conference room, as was Seras' coffin. Zoey had laid her roll out next to where Seras slept and made her way towards it. "So we're not worrying about other survivors anymore?" she asked.

"No," Integra said. "We don't have the resources for a rescue operation. I thought we could manage, but if we keep on like we've been, we'll be as dead as everyone else."

"How's your leg," Zoey asked, watching Seras leave the room.

"I need to see a doctor, but for the time being it's fine," Integra said, wincing as she walked. "I've had worse injuries."

"Sorry, again," Zoey said.

They had both made it to their bedrolls and laid down. Integra faced away from Zoey, vexed that the only person she managed to rescue from London was an America tourist suffering from some bizarre manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome.

**To be continued...**


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter Seventeen.**

Two hours, they said. Two hours tops.

Zoey kept running what Integra had said over in her mind, hoping she hadn't heard right. She thought Integra said they would be back inside of two hours, allowing for detours and any technical problems there may be with the helicopter.

It had been four hours.

It was nearly noon, but dusk had never seemed so close and she kept her assault rifle trained on the door to the Round Table conference room even though the hall outside was silent. The large windows that let light into the room were two stories up and bullet proof, or so Integra had said, but Zoey kept a careful eye on them as well.

She nearly opened fire when she heard the distant slam of a door somewhere in the compound. Integra had been clear that she shouldn't move until she actually saw Seras or herself return. _Good advice, _Zoey thought, noting the conspicuous absence of a helicopter. _Maybe it didn't work. That would explain the slamming door._

Whoever it was had entered the hallway outside, meaning they had some idea where they were going. What made Zoey grip the gun tighter was the fact they were opening doors as they came her way as though they were searching the place.

_Nick, or Coach,_ she thought, wondering if she would shoot them. They deserved it, but she didn't think she could kill an actual human being. _Maybe it's someone else. Someone from the government._

The door to the conference room swung open, offering Zoey a brief glimpse of a person in a black coat with what looked like white bandages on their face and sunglasses. They slipped out of sight before she could shout or shoot.

"Who's there?" Zoey shouted.

"My name is Heinkel," said a voice. It sounded like a woman's, but something was wrong, as though her mouth or jaw was injured. Zoey thought she detected an accent, but it was hard to tell. "Where is Sir Integra Hellsing?"

Zoey's brow wrinkled. "Don't you mean Dame Integra?"

"What?"

"Dame. She's a female knight. Male knights are sir, females are dame. Right?"

There was silence from the hallway and for a moment Zoey thought she had made a mistake. "Whatever," said Heinkel. "Is she here? What about Seras Victoria?"

Zoey felt she was on the cusp of a very important decision, but had to make it blind, not knowing who this person was or what she wanted.

"I was ordered to guard this room," Zoey said. "I don't know where they are." If Heinkel turned out to be friendly, she'd get the truth, Zoey thought.

"I'm not here to harm you," Heinkel said. "I'm with the Vatican. I'd rather not hide out in the hallway."

Zoey lowered the rifle and Heinkel moved to stand in the doorway. She thought she had heard her wrong when she said "Vatican," but she was dressed like a priest and carrying a pistol. "Are you alright?" Zoey asked, looking at her bandages.

"It's an old wound," Heinkel said. "Are you sure you don't know where Hellsing is? I need to speak with them."

"I'm sure," Zoey said. Something about Heinkel didn't seem right. _Nothing_ _about her seems right,_ she thought, wondering when Catholics allowed female priests, much less gun-totting ones dressed like the invisible man.

"Do you have any idea when they will be back? Did they abandon you?"

"I hope not," Zoey said. "Look, I don't know. They didn't tell me anything. I'm just supposed to guard this room."

"There's nothing in here to guard," Heinkel said, looking behind Zoey. "And you're lying."

"I-I'm not," Zoey said. "Look, I'm just a tourist. I got caught up in this mess and I just want to go home."

"That's what the other two said." Heinkel walked into the room and Zoey raised her gun. Heinkel ignored it and walked past her. "My men have secured the perimeter of this place by now. If Hellsing is still here, we will find them. I'd use you as a hostage if I thought they gave a rat's ass about you."

Zoey held the rifle up and aimed it at Heinkel's head, who stood by Seras's coffin and gave it a light kick. "Who are you and what is your problem?" Zoey shouted. "Can't you see what's going on outside?"

Heinkel laughed. It sounded as though she was missing part of her face. "Let me explain a few things to you," Heinkel said. "I really shouldn't, but I don't think it matters. I owe Hellsing for someone's death years ago, so this is personal. And even if it wasn't, the Vatican and some others are convinced this plague is Hellsing's doing, more specifically Seras Victoria's."

Zoey tried to stop herself from shaking. Heinkel didn't seem concerned at all about the gun pointed at her. "I don't know what you're talking about. Hellsing is as clueless as everyone else about what caused this."

Heinkel laughed again and clapped her gloved hands together. She began taking slow steps towards Zoey, who wondered if she would have to shoot the woman's head off.

"You're right. It's obvious to any fool that the things out there aren't the spawn of vampires. I'm ashamed the Vatican sent me here to assassinate Victoria, but there aren't enough members of Iscariot left to convince them and what's left of the world's governments of the truth. The world is dying, and is delirious with pain and confusion. It'll will strike at the nearest thing it's injured brain perceives as the source of its agony and that is the vampire Seras Victoria."

She ducked and darted around to the side just as Zoey's muscles tensed to pull the trigger on her rifle. In a flash of movement, the gun was pointed at the ceiling, and Heinkel's forearm was at her throat. Her leg hooked around, sending Zoey toppling backward with Heinkel on top of her. "Do you think they're on your side?" Heinkel asked, pressing her elbow over Zoey's throat, making her gag. "They pulled you in to use as cannon fodder to make good their own escape. Tell me where they went and I'll let you live. Play games and I'll torture you then feed you to the monsters."

Zoey felt blood rush to her head and her vision began to blur at the edges. She struggled hard, but couldn't dislodge Heinkel. As her vision grew darker she hoped Seras and Integra would return before she had to tell Heinkel what she wanted to know.

**To be continued...**


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter Eighteen.**

Integra knew she probably looked rather stupid clinging to Seras' back while she ran across roof tops and leaped from building to building. Her arms were wrapped around Seras' neck and she had to cling with all her strength to keep from falling, but Seras didn't need to breath.

Seras stopped on a fire escape and pointed to her left while making a gagging sound. Air was necessary for speaking, however, and Integra let go, putting her weight on her good leg. "There it is," Seras said, pointing to the hospital's roof and rubbing her throat. The helicopter sat still against the brightening skyline like a lazy Crane Fly.

"Looks clear. Let's get to it before we attract too much attention."

They'd gone past most of what she thought of as the common infected. Only a few times did Seras have to change course to avoid wasting time in a battle with one of the less common types. They had a close call when a smoker's tongue nearly missed ensnaring the both.

"Shall we?" Integra said. Seras crouched and she hopped on her back again, feeling foolish. Seras was off again, leaping over the railing and bouncing off the edge of the fire escape. Her arm dissolved into a sting of living shadow and she used it to glide over a throng of infected in the street bellow. The arm twisted into a grasping claw which found holds in the other building.

Soon they were on the roof with the helicopter, and Integra's fear began to materialize.

Their travel had not gone unnoticed, and with the hospital having been an epicenter of infection, the roof practically shook with the footfalls of approaching enemies. Like flightless locusts, Integra saw them bursting out of doors and climbing up walls. Some went spilling over the edges of roofs, heedless of the drop and focused only on killing the uninfected.

"Cover me and pray this thing can fly," Integra said, jumped off Seras's back and wincing when her bad leg was called on to bear weight.

"Yes, ma'am," Seras said, running from the helicopter, likely hoping to draw some of the infected off.

The cockpit wasn't damaged, and she went quickly through the pre-flight procedures, knowing she'd sooner die fighting hordes of monsters than in a helicopter crash. "Damn it," she said, as a pale figure stuck its head in through the passenger door. Its eyes were sunken and bleeding, and it screamed as it clawed at her. She shot it in the face.

Preparing the chopper for takeoff became slower as she was forced to periodically fight for her life. "Seras!" she shouted, as one grabbed her gun arm while another took hold of her hair. She could fight them, but not get the helicopter airborne at the same time.

The one on her gun arm was yanked off, and she shot the two behind her, hoping she wouldn't damage the cockpit. "There's too many," Seras said, "Even for me!"

"Just get the doors shut," Integra said, letting Seras crawl over her lap to fight the incoming infected coming in from the passenger side. She could hear the ones in back that had made there way into where patients were transported. She kicked a bloody woman in the face and pulled the door shut, slamming clawed fingers a few times before getting it fully closed.

The blade began to whir rotate, blowing the matted, gore encrusted hair if the infected back. Integra heard a noise rise above the angry cacophony made by the infected throats and looked to see something the size of a van with the posture of a gorilla climbing up over the edge of the hospital roof. "Tank," Integra said. "We won't be ready for take-off for another minute."

"Fly when you can, I'll catch up," Seras said, leaving the chopper and shutting the door. Infected piled on her, striking at her head and pulling at her hair. Each one she took hold of died a grisly death, but were replaced.

Seras tore her way through the crowd of infected, ignoring the pain as they picked away at her and her limbs crashed into their skulls and bodies, pulping bone and sending their bodies flying away in crumpled heaps.

The tank couldn't be allowed to damage the chopper. Once it was in the air, she planned to leave whether the beast was alive or not. She planned to tear off its head which was nestled like a tick between its obscenely muscled shoulders. Doing so might be a little difficult, however, as she was swimming through a sea of human bodies that were trying to rend her to pieces. Her shirt had already been torn open, and she thought it likely she'd be indecent before the fight was over.

The tank was loping towards her, using its giant fists more so than its tiny legs for locomotion. She swatted at the common infected and they scattered like sheets, but inhibited her all the same. The tank barreled through them and caught Seras with a powerful sideways swing.

Her trip through the air was slowed by the other infected and she found herself lying in a writhing heap of them. Scrambling to her feet, she shouted to get the tank's attention. Her screech was a higher pitch than the rhythmic hum of the chopper blades, at it turned, as did the others.

She shaped her shadow arm into a spear and sent it towards the monster's head. Jostled by the infected around her, it missed and sunk into the tank's shoulder. It roared, grabbed the black mass sticking into it and pulled Seras in closer.

Seras tried to pull the arm back, but the tank wouldn't let go. She got the idea to create splinter tendrils to attack the monster, but thought of it too late. The tank's other fist came crashing down on her, slamming her into the hospital's roof. With all her might, she concentrated, willing herself to dissolve. She did so just as its fist came down a second time, splattering her like a mallet hitting a gelatine snack cup.

She had been nothing but a dark mass before, but this was a new sensation. Formless and scattered, she briefly remembered someone she had met briefly, years ago. He was a strange, terrible little person, who said he was everywhere and nowhere. Perhaps this was something like what he meant.

A more immediate concern was Integra and the chopper, both were somewhere and had to be going anywhere else very shortly, lest they go nowhere.

_Enough of that,_ she thought, and imagined herself coming together, standing on the roof of the hospital. The sensation of coming together again was as strange as coming apart, and soon she was blinking, looking at the backs of hundreds of diseased-crazed humans.

The infected had lost interest in her while she was in pieces and so had the tank. It was heading for the helicopter again, and Seras thought she'd failed. She sprinted as fast as her long legs would carry her, feeling a bit like a rugby player as she ran past infected and took advantage of gaps left by the monster as it tore through its less-mutated brethren.

"Stop!" she shouted, and dived for its legs, harkening back to her brief career as a cop. While it ran on its knuckles, it needed its legs for balance. It fell forward, cushioned by its massive chest.

Seras took hold of the tank's human-sized left leg as common infected assailed her back. With a twist and a pull, she was holding a foot and a shin in her hand, which she used to strike the other infected.

The tank's roars of anger were drowned out by the sound of the helicopter rising into the air. She watched fly off until she was hit in the face by an infected teenager.

There was no reason to stay, but the tank had caused her far too many problems to be allowed to live. She climbed over its back as it righted itself, standing precariously on one foot. With all her might, she drove the stump end of the severed leg downward, hoping the bone inside would punch through the skull. It was more of a crush than a puncture, but it did the job and the tank slumped sideways, leaving Seras free to flee the scene.

**To be continued...**


	19. Chapter 19

**Chapter Nineteen.**

The Hellsing compound was under attack, and Heinkel hadn't brought enough men to defend it, or so it seemed to Zoey, who once again sat tied to a chair.

Her hands were cuffed behind her, while extension cords had been wound around her feet and torso. She'd been dragged up to the roof where Heinkel and the three surviving Section Thirteen members had retreated to, their route to the APCs having been cut off.

"I'm going to be very annoyed if I'm killed before Hellsing arrives," Heinkel said, shooting an infected woman through the face that had managed to climb up a storm drain. They were out on a flat area of the roof and it looked like they might hold the infected off for a while, at least until help came.

Zoey only hoped she wouldn't be killed in the crossfire.

The infected showed up just as Heinkel began to get serious with her interrogation. She'd slapped Zoey nearly silly, and had found a pair of pliers to use when the front gate collapsed under the pressure from a massive wave of bodies.

Her worry was that Heinkel seemed to know exactly who she was up against and had no intention of winning the fight. Maybe she just planned on killing her in front of Integra and Seras, thinking it would hurt them. _Would it? _ She wondered. Maybe Seras. The only inhuman in the equation seemed to be the one most sympathetic to human suffering.

Something long and ropey coiled around a Section Thirteen member, knocking his sunglasses off before pulling him over the edge of the roof to his death. Heinkel seemed to be carrying an armory's worth of bullets, and kept firing at the infected that made their way up. Every few seconds she put a bullet in the door to the roof, which briefly calmed the banging from the other side.

"Bah, this was a waste," Heinkel said, changing a clip. "Hellsing abandoned you. They probably left you here as bait. Who would have thought Integra Hellsing would stoop so low...a knight of England, no less."

_Here it comes, the bullet to the back of my head,_ Zoey thought. She imagined the barrel of Heinkel's gun inches behind her pony-tail and wondered if it would be blown off.

She closed her eyes and heard a low buzzing above the wails of the infected. Was she dead? No, it was a helicopter. She opened her eyes and smiled, seeing the flying vehicle making haste towards their position over the cloudy skyline.

"Speak of the devil," Heinkel said. "Finally, this has been a long time coming."

The two remaining men had split off from Heinkel and Zoey. She could see them if she craned her neck. They would be on the other side of the chopper when it landed, but they were more focused on killing a jockey that had made its way up and was running in circles around them, laughing.

The chopper came in low and hard. It tilted forward and Zoey didn't need Heinkel's cry of surprise and anger to tell her that Integra wasn't coming in for a landing.

No sane pilot of any skill would have attempted such a stunt, Zoey thought, but it evened the playing field rather nicely. Integra flew low over the roof at such an angle that turned the chopper's blades into a buzz-saw. The two Section Thirteen members and the jockey, which had finally leaped onto one's back, were diced like carrots on a Sunday cooking show. A cloud of blood misted the front of the chopper along with body parts, hands, feet, bits of skull. A spinal column fell at Zoey's feet.

Heinkel held her fire, apparently not wanting to kill her enemies in a helicopter crash. The chopper came back, and Zoey thought this would be the end of her, only Integra landed it instead of chopping them up with the blades.

The blades slowed, but didn't stop as Integra got out, holding a gun.

"Integra Hellsing," Heinkel said. "Where's your pet abomination?"

"She opted to walk," Integra said. "What the bloody hell are you doing here?"

"Settling something," Heinkel said. "I was hoping to do it with your vampire, but you'll have to do. This is more appropriate, anyway. We should have killed you when we had the chance...I'll never understand Father Anderson's reasoning behind letting you walk, much less escorting you to a safe zone."

"I would imagine lucid behavior might seem jarring to a lunatic," Integra said. "Untie the girl first. If neither of us survive she'll still be able to escape."

Four gun blasts and Zoey found herself able to stand. She was still cuffed, though. "Good enough," Heinkel said. "Now die!"

Zoey hit the roof, hard, flattening herself out as much as possible and praying she didn't take a bullet. When the shooting stopped, she rolled to see Integra slumped against the nose of the chopper and Heinkel lying still on her side.

The left side of Integra's head was a wash of blood. Zoey thought she'd had her brains blown out, but her other eye fluttered open and she clamped a hand over the blood wound. "Ow..." Integra said, standing up.

She pulled off her ruined eye patch and took a step forward. She fell, and Zoey saw a bullet wound in her upper thigh on the leg Zoey hadn't accidentally shot. "Are you alright?" she asked, kneeling.

"No, I'm pretty far from alright," Integra said.

Something hit Zoey in the back and she fell forward onto Integra. Soon, her world was one of kicks and stomps, as infected poured over them. _After all that, beaten to death,_ Zoey said, wondering what had happened to Seras.

She wondered no more when the bodies above her were torn away, and Seras stood over her, holding out her gore stained hand. "Come on," she said, and Zoey took it.

They were soon inside the chopper, with a loudly cursing Integra in the pilot's seat. As they took off, Zoey was able to look down and see the roof overrun by infected, common and uncommon alike, all enraged that their prey had escaped.

Seras and Zoey climbed into the rear of the chopper where patients were transported and searched for items they could use to bandage Integra's wounds as she flew. In the end, they had to set down on the roof of a shopping center for a brief period to stop Integra's bleeding.

Zoey did most of the work, while Seras hung back. She noticed how the vampire looked at Integra, at all the blood, and after she was done and they were in the air again, Zoey went to the back where Seras had sequestered herself.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

Seras sat, nodding. "Getting back was hard," she said. "I need..."

Zoey pulled down her collar and tilted her head, showing off her white, if dirty, neck. "Please," she said. "You've helped me a lot, I think it's only fair."

After a few seconds' hesitation, Seras crawled forward over Zoey and made a seal with her lips around the other woman's neck. Her fangs extended and she punctured the skin. Zoey felt her warm blood begin to leak out, mixing with Seras's saliva before being gulped down.

"Thank you," Seras said, pulling away and licking the wound so it healed.

"Don't mention it," Zoey said, lying on her back. She drifted off to the sound and feel of the helicopter's engine as they buzzed through the air towards the sea.

**Epilogue.**

Shit luck, his father had called it. Good fortune caused by a bad situation that only served to prolong suffering.

At leas that's what Nick thought his father had meant by that saying. He might have just been swearing.

Both he and Coach, who was panting heavily beside him as they made their way through a suburban park, had rushed the train killer as she fired her gun. Coach caught it in the arm, and Nick thought she would kill the both anyway during the fight.

Heinkel, or whatever her name was, fought mean. Knees to the groin, thumbs in the eye, the works. If a damn tank hadn't shown up with its piss-ant friends when it did, she probably would have finished them off, if not by herself then with help.

The APC had been rolled like a child's Tonka truck and the back door popped open. More interested in escape than battle, Coach and Nick ran, leaving Heinkel to fire at them at an odd angle while infected harried their every step.

The river had saved them. Infected turned out to be shitty swimmers. Too pissed to hold their breath maybe, Nick didn't know.

Now it was nearly twilight and not quite as easy to spot infected before they saw them. Both had decided it was best to hold up in a cemetery they found near the park, maybe inside a mausoleum. Creepy, yes, but the wall and the stones might make for cover during the night.

"Shit, watch it," Nick said, seeing a figure standing at the top of a hill where a gaudy looking stone statue stood.

"I don't think he's infected," Coach said.

The figure was tall and dressed in a long coat that blew in the wind, which heralded a storm. "Doesn't matter," Nick said. "Hell, it's the uninfected that nearly killed us."

"I've been thinking about that," Coach said. "We might have messed up back there, with that vampire."

"I doubt it," Nick said, lying. They had seen a low-flying helicopter earlier, and he could have sworn on his mother's grave a familiar looking middle finger had been dangled out the side door at him.

The tall figure was now waving politely at them. They'd been spotted. "Aw, to hell with it," Coach said, walking up the hill with Nick not far behind. "Hey, mister," he said. "You know your way around here?"

Nick noticed the man's skin was pale enough to nearly glow in the dim light. His short black hair was tussled, and the red coat he wore stained in blood. A large sliver pistol hung tucked in a belt strap around his waist. "I've lived her for many years," the man said, his voice deep and resonant. _Probably a real lady killer,_ Nick thought, not liking the guy already.

"Good. We're tired and hungry and we need a place to hole up," Coach said. "Hope you don't mind me askin', but uh,...you ain't with the church, are you?"

The man laughed. "We had a falling out some years back, so no, not really."

"I'm glad to hear that," Coach said. "Man, you wouldn't believe the people we've run into today."

The man smiled, his teeth showing even in the fading light. "You're lucky to be alive," he said. "I hope your luck holds out. Humans are so much fun to watch in times like these."

"Aw, come on," Nick said throwing his hands up, as the man's eyes glowed red in the gloom.

**The End. **


End file.
